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SELECTED 
ENGLISH LETTERS 

EDITED BY 

CLAUDE M. FUESS, Ph.D. 

W 
INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH 

PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER, MASS. 




BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, I914, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



Acknowledgrnent for the use of material is hereby made 
to Charles Scribner's Sons, for the use of the letter of Robert 
Louis Stevenson ; to The Macmillan Company, for the use 
of the two letters of Edward FitzGerald ; to Houghton Mif- 
flin Company, for a letter from their office files ; to Hart, 
Schaffner & Marx, for a business letter ; and to Dr. Charles 
W. Eliot and Dr. Henry van Dyke for letters taken from 
their private correspondence. 



FEB 12 1914 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 

©CI.A3 6 25 6 0. 



CONTENTS 

Introductory v 

I. William Paston, Junior, to his Brother, John 

Paston 1 

II. Sir Henry Sidney to his Son, Philip Sidney . 2 

III. Sir Francis Bacon to Sir Edward Coke ... 5 

IV. Dean Swift to Alexander Pope 6 

V. Joseph Addison to Chamberlain Dashwood. . 8 

VI. Richard Steele to Mary Scurlock ^ 

Vn. Richard Steele to Mrs. Steele 10 

VIII. Alexander Pope to Dean Swift 11 

IX. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Mrs. S. C 13 

X. The Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, Philip 

Stanhope, Esq 16 

XI. Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley . . 20 
Xn. Dr. Samuel Johnson to the Earl of Chester- 
field 20 

Xin. Dr. Samuel Johnson to Mr. Macpherson ... 23 
XrV. The Honourable Horace Walpole to George 

Montagu 23 

XV. Oliver Goldsmith to Maurice Goldsmith . . 27 
XVI. William Cowper to the Reverend William 

Unwin 30 

XVn. William Cowper to Lady Hesketh 32 

XVIII. John Adams to his Wife 35 

XIX. Robert Burns to the Earl of Glencairn . . 36 

XX. Sir Walter Scott to George Crabbe .... 37 

XXI. Sydney Smith to Lady Georgiana Morpeth. . 40 

XXII. Sydney Smith to Miss 41 

XXIII. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin 42 

XXIV. Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth ... 43 
XXV. Benjamin Robert Haydon to Miss Mitford . 45 

XXVI. Lord Byron to Thomas Moore 48 

XXVII. Lord Byron to John Murray 49 

XXVIII. Percy Bysshe Shelley to John Keats ... 52 

XXIX. John Keats to Percy Bysshe Shelley .... 53 



iv CONTENTS 

XXX. Percy B ysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock 55 

XXXI. Thomas Carlyle to Benjamin Disraeli. . . 58 

XXXII. Thomas Hood to May 59 

XXXIII. Thomas Hood to Sir Robert Peel .... 61 

XXXIV. Thomas Macaulay to his Father 62 

XXXV. Jane Welsh Carlyle to Mrs. Welsh ... 64 

XXXVI. John Sterling to Thomas Carlyle .... 65 

XXXVn. John Greenleaf Whittier to Lucy Larcom . 66 

XXXVIII. Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley ... 67 

XXXIX. Oliver Wendell Holmes to James T. Fields 69 

XL. Edward FitzGerald to John Allen .... 71 

XLI. Edward FitzGerald to Charles Eliot Norton 74 

XLII. William Makepeace Thackeray to Edward 

FitzGerald 76 

XLIII. Charles Dickens to Mr. Felton 77 

XLIV. Robert Browning to Miss Euphrasia Ha worth 80 

XLV. Charlotte Bronte to Robert Southey . . 83 

XL VI. Ebenezer Rock wood Hoar to John M. Forbes 85 

XL VII. Henry David Thoreau to Horace Greeley . 86 

XL VIII. John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton. . . 88 

XLIX. James Russell Lowell to Ralph Waldo 

Emerson . 90 

L. Charles Godfrey Leland to Miss Mary A, 

Owen 91 

LI. Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean 

HOWELLS 93 

LII. Thomas Bailey Aldrich to George E. Wood- 
berry 94 

Lin. Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin . 96 
LIV. Lafcadio Hearn to Joseph Tunison .... 99 
LV. Lafcadio Hearn to Mitchell McDonald . . 101 
LVI. William Vaughn Moody to Daniel Gregory 

Mason 102 

LVII. Charles W. Eliot to 105 

LVIII. Henry van Dyke to Madison Cawein . . . 107 
LIX. Hart, Schaffner & Marx to the John B. 

Jones Company 109 

LX. Houghton Mifflin Company to Hon. Woodrow 

Wilson 110 

Notes 112 



INTRODUCTORY 

Since the letter is the one form of writing which every- 
body finds it necessary at one time or another to use, it 
shows perhaps a wider range and a greater diversity than 
any other literary type. As an aid to business or as a con- 
venience in polite society, it is, of course, indispensable and 
universal in our modern life, although when employed for 
these purposes it is bound by rules so fixed that individual- 
ity has seldom chance for play ; on the other hand, as a 
means of friendly communication, a substitute for familiar 
talk, it is governed by few, if any, restrictions, and may 
thus, in style as well as in substance, become a free expres- 
sion of the moods and personality of its author. In the first 
case, however great may be its immediate and practical use- 
fulness, it is, as art, usually undistinguished and ephemeral ; 
in the second, it has boundless possibilities, and may, when 
handled by a master, become autobiographical writing of 
high excellence. So many letters being of the transitory 
character represented by this former class, any discussion 
of the letter as literature must begin by eliminating the 
large proportion of everyday correspondence which has no 
permanent value. 

A further limitation arises from the fact that because the 
most spontaneous and genuine letters are ordinarily com- 
posed without any thought of publication, only an insignifi- 
cant number, probably, are preserved. Unless there is some 
definite reason for keeping them for future reference, or 
unless the recipient has a ready sense of literary apprecia- 
tion, many valuable letters inevitably disappear. Even if 
not actually destroyed, it has been, until recent years, only 
in exceptional instances that they have found their way to 
publication. It is certain that through carelessness, acci- 
dent, or the natural reluctance of men to give their own or 



vi INTRODUCTORY 

their friends' private affairs to the world, much of the 
product of even the finest letter-writers has been lost. We 
have, then, for examination only a small part of the real 
literature dispatched as letters, and from this remnant the 
type must be studied if it is to be studied at all. 

Valuable as formal business or social letters may be in 
their own field, they offer scant opportunity for personality 
to show itself. They are sent with specific motives ; they fol- 
low, to a large extent, stereotyped rules ; and their most 
essential requisites are brevity and clearness, so that no 
statement may be loose or equivocal. To diverge in any 
marked degree from settled usage in letters such as these is 
deliberately to set one's self apart as ignorant or peculiar ; 
indeed, the disregard of custom is, for the average person, 
undesirable, even senseless, for it obviously lessens his 
chances of gaining his end. Just as men wisely comply with 
arbitrary requirements in dress or manners, so they com- 
pose their commercial letters in the mode prescribed by 
convention. The rules of formal letter-writing, moreover, 
are not irrational or petty ; each has its origin in some de- 
mand for economy in time or energy. For the sake of illus- 
tration a few characteristic examples of such letters have 
been inserted at the end of this volume, and the mechanical 
details so important in correspondence of this kind may be 
investigated further, either in any treatise on the subject, 
or, better still, in the procedure of any reputable business 
house. 

A fair share of letters, however, as has been said, are 
written under circumstances which tend to make letter- 
writing an art and may turn the letter itself into literature. 
In a private correspondence between friend and friend, 
without any ulterior aim beyond sociability, formality and 
rigidity of construction ought to be neglected, as they are in 
intimate conversation. Such letters are really, as Cowper 
suggested, merely '' talking on paper," and their structure 
makes little difference if only they are animated by the 
spirit of their writers. We seek in them the virtues that 



INTRODUCTORY vii 

belong to so-called confessional literature. Unless a letter 
of this nature has personality, unless it is a revelation of 
the undisguised man, without affectation, stiffness, or reti- 
cence, it is scarcely worth considering. The most skillful 
letter-writers — Cowper, Byron, FitzGerald, and Steven- 
son — have been people of unabashed egotism, whom nothing 
could deter from gossiping about themselves, their opin- 
ions, experiences, and ambitions. It is recognized that in 
confidential correspondence an author is privileged to be in 
mental undress, as he is at his own fireside, at liberty to 
disclose emotions and vanities commonly veiled from the 
public. Furthermore, an absolute sincerity is demanded ; 
anything theatrical, hypocritical, or self-conscious strikes 
a false note at once. A certain ease and grace of style, the 
embodiment of a chatty habit of mind, is also an element 
of the fine familiar letter. Finally, it must have entertain- 
ing qualities, displaying freshness and intelligence of vision 
with the added charm of sensitiveness to impressions and 
an unusual attitude towards life ; if it simply repeats the 
shopworn phrases that serve so often in the place of 
thought, we ignore it as lacking in originality. Of course, 
only in exceptional instances does any letter meet these ex- 
acting requirements ; but an outline of them serves to create 
an ideal by which correspondence may be measured. 

It is evident, then, that good letter-writing, being de- 
pendent so largely on personality, is really a gift. Many 
otherwise famous literary men have apparently been defi- 
cient in the ability to write artistic letters : the correspond- 
ence of three such different authors as Addison, Words- 
worth, and Matthew Arnold, for instance, is alike in its 
singular lack of flexibility and vivacity. On the other hand, 
some genius usually estimated as minor may be endowed 
with just the peculiar attributes which fill a letter with spice 
and flavor. Persons like Horace Walpole, Jane Welsh Car- 
lyle, and Lafcadio Hearn, with their foibles, prejudices, and 
eccentric temperaments, are among the finest letter-writers. 
No essay can hope to analyze the type of letter which they 



viii INTRODUCTORY 

perfected ; it would be as vain as an attempt to dissect lyric 
poetry in the classroom. Artlessly, often unwittingly, in 
fugitive whims and fancies, these writers have drawn por- 
traits of themselves, and have so sketched their own char- 
acters that it is possible, from their letters alone, to recon- 
struct a complete personality. Individuality is discernible 
in tricks of phrasing, in delicate touches of allusion, in 
ideas which are unique and unhackneyed. But in the end 
each of us must find his own way. To imitate, to play the 
" sedulous ape " to another, is to lose naturalness and truth. 
To observe the methods of others may be stimulating, in so 
far as it teaches the lesson that a letter can be good only by 
being an open manifestation of one's thoughts and feelings ; 
but the letter of one writer can rarely be the model for 
another. The only recipe for success is to look in one's 
heart, and write. 

In the anthology here presented, an effort has been made 
to furnish an opportunity for study, from the documents 
themselves, of those eminent English letter-writers whose 
correspondence is available for publication. In order that 
the evolution of the type may be traced, the selections have 
been arranged, whenever practicable, chronologically in ac- 
cordance with the birth-dates of the authors, the letters of 
one writer being thus ordinarily grouped together. Letters 
have usually been given complete, not in extracts or parts. 
None except genuine letters from one person to another 
have been included, all artificial forms, in books, for in- 
stance, being disregarded. Since the letters, in general, 
speak for themselves, extended annotation is both unneces- 
sary and supererogatory ; the notes, therefore, are few in 
number, compact, and confined either to short outlines of 
authors' lives or to explanations of passages which hinder 
the understanding of the letters. 

A word may be added as to the principles which have de- 
termined the selection. Most of the letters are by men and 
women who are of interest in connection with books often 
get for reading in schools and colleges ; indeed, the volume 



INTRODUCTORY ix 

is intended primarily for such students, though it is hoped 
that its scope and variety may appeal to a wider public. 
Not a few of the letters are, perhaps, somewhat hackneyed ; 
but following Sir Arthur Quiller Couch in his choice of 
poems for the Oxford Book of English Verse, I have re- 
membered that "the best is the best, though a hundred 
critics have declared it so." Letters have been picked, not 
only adequately illustrating the characters of their writers, 
but also possessing some added interest of an amusing or 
entertaining sort ; for the end of a compilation of this kind 
is less to provide knowledge than to arouse pleasure and 
emulation in an art which does not deserve to be neglected. 
The percentage of modern letters is comparatively large, 
the idea being that they have the advantage of bringing 
literature into close touch with the life around us. 



SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 



A fortunate chance has preserved to us a large portion 
of the correspondence of a certain Paston family from Nor- 
folk, England, during the period from 1422 to 1509. These 
Paston letters constitute our earliest collection of the sort in 
English, and, being largely of a private character, they 
throw much light on the informal letter-writing of the fif- 
teenth century. The following, from a young fellow at Eton 
to his elder brother, is, in substance, such a schoolboy plea 
as might have been sent yesterday. 

William Paston^ Junior^ to his Brother^ John Paston 

Nov. 7, 1478. 
Eight reverent and worshipful brother, — 

I recommend me on to you, desiring to hear of your 
welfare and prosperity, letting you wit tliat I have 
received of Alwedyr a letter, and a noble in gold 
therein. Furthermore my creditor, Master Thomas, 
heartily recommended him to you, and he prayeth you 
to send him some money for my commons ; for he 
saith ye be twenty-two shillings in his debt, for a 
month was to pay for when he had money last. 

Also I beseech you to send me a hose cloth, one for 
the holydays of some color, and another for the work- 
ing days, how corse so ever it be it maketh no matter ; 
and a stomacher, and two shirts, and a pair of slippers. 
And if it like you that I may come with Alwedyr by 
water, and sport me with you in London a day or two 



2 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

this term time, then you may let all this be till the 
time that I come, and then I will tell you when I 
shall be ready to come from Eton, by the grace of 
God, Whom have you in His keeping. 

Written the Saturday next after All Hallowe'en 
Day with the hand of your brother, 

William Paston. 

II 

This letter was sent by Sir Henry Sidney (1529-86) to 
his more famous son, Philip, then a scholar in Shrewsbury 
School. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), who lived to exem- 
plify in his character the Renaissance ideals expressed in 
his father's counsel, became a picturesque figure at the court 
of Queen Elizabeth, wrote the pastoral romance of Arcadia 
and a series of brilliant sonnets called Astrophel and Stella^ 
and finally died fighting gallantly on the battle-field of 
Zutphen. As a specimen of parental admonition, this should 
be compared with Lord Chesterfield's letter to his son in 
the eighteenth century (see page 16). 

Sir Henry Sidney to his Son^ Philip Sidney 

[1566.] 
I have received two letters from you, one written 
in Latin, the other in French, which I take in good 
part, and will you to exercise that practice of learn- 
ing often : for that will stand you in most stead, in 
that profession of life that you are born to live in. 
And, since this is my first letter that ever I did write 
to you, I will not, that it be all empty of some advices, 
which my natural care of you provoked me to wish 
you to follow, as documents to you in this your tender 
age. Let your first action be, the lifting up of your 
mind to Almighty God, by hearty prayer, and feel- 



Sm HENRY SIDNEY 3 

ingly digest the words you speak in prayer, with con- 
tinual meditation, and thinking of him to whom you 
pray, and of the matter for which you pray. And use 
this as an ordinary, and at an ordinary hour. Whereby 
the time itself will put you in remembrance to do that 
which you are accustomed to do. In that time apply 
your study to such hours as your discreet master doth 
assign you, earnestly ; and the time (I know) he will 
so limit, as shall be both sufficient for your learning, 
and safe for your health. And mark the sense and the 
matter of that you read, as well as the words. So shall 
you both enrich your tongue with words, and your wit 
with matter ; and judgment will grow as years groweth 
in you. Be humble and obedient to your master, for 
unless you frame yourself to obey others, yea, and 
feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be 
able to teach others how to obey you. Be courteous of 
gesture, and affable to all men, with diversity of rev- 
erence, according to the dignity of the person. There 
is nothing that winneth so much with so little cost. 
Use moderate diet, so as, after your meat, you may 
find your wit fresher, and not duller, and your body 
more lively, and not more heavy. Seldom drink wine, 
and yet sometime do, lest being enforced to drink 
upon the sudden, you should find yourself inflamed. 
Use exercise of body, but such as is without peril of 
your joints or bones. It will increase your force, and 
enlarge your breath. Delight to be cleanly, as well 
in all parts of your body, as in your garments. It 
shall make you grateful in each company, and other- 
wise loathsome. Give yourself to be merry, for 
you degenerate from your father, if you find not 
yourself most able in wit and body, to do any thing, 



4 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

when you be most merry ; but let your mirth be ever 
void of all scurrility, and biting words to any man, 
for a wound given by a word is oftentimes harder to 
be cured than that which is given with the sword. Be 
you rather a hearer and bearer away of other men's 
talk, than a beginner or procurer of speech, otherwise 
you shall be counted to delight to hear yourself speak. 
If you hear a wise sentence, or an apt phrase, commit 
it to your memory, with respect of the circumstance, 
when you shall speak it. Let never oath be heard to 
come out of your mouth, nor words of ribaldry ; de- 
test it in others, so shall custom make to yourself a 
law against it in yourself. Be modest in each assembly, 
and rather be rebuked of light fellows, for maiden-like 
shamefacedness, than of your sad friends for pert 
boldness. Think upon every word that you will speak, 
before you utter it, and remember how nature hath 
rampired ^ up (as it were) the tongue with teeth, lips, 
yea, and hair without the lips, and all betokening 
reins, or bridles, for the loose use of that member. 
Above all things tell no untruth, no, not in trifles. 
The custom of it is naughty, and let it not satisfy you, 
that, for a time, the hearers take it for a truth ; for 
after it will be known as it is, to your shame ; for 
there cannot be a greater reproach to a gentleman 
than to be accounted a liar. Study and endeavour 
yourself to be virtuously occupied. So shall you make 
such an habit of well-doing in you, that you shall not 
know how to do evil, though you would. Remember, 
my son, the noble blood you are descended of, by your 
mother's 2 side ; and think that only by virtuous life 
and good action, you may be an ornament to that 
illustrious family; and otherwise, through vice and 



SIR FRANCIS BACON 5 

sloth, you shall be counted lahes generis^^ one of the 
greatest curses that can happen to man. Well (my 
little Philip) this is enough for me, and too much, I 
fear, for you. But if I shall find that this light meal of 
digestion nourish anything the weak stomach of your 
young capacity, I will, as I find the same grow stronger, 
feed it with tougher food. Your loving father, so long 
as you live in the fear of God. 

Ill 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), essayist, statesman, and 
philosopher, passed through several stages of political pre- 
ferment, eventually becoming Lord Chancellor (1619) and 
Viscount St. Albans (1621). He was, however, accused of 
corruption in 1621 and forced to retire from public life. 
As a philosopher, he established the value of the inductive 
method of reasoning, and published several authoritative 
works in Latin ; his Essays, in English, are models of com- 
pressed style and profound thought. The following letter 
was written to Sir Edward Coke, a distinguished lawyer, 
who had thwarted Bacon in his desire to become Attorney- 
General, and was his most conspicuous public enemy. 

Sir Francis Bacon to Sir Edward Cohe 

[Before June, 1606.] 

Mr. Attorney, — 

I thought best once for all, to let you know in 
plainness what I find of you, and what you shall find 
of me. You take to yourself a liberty to disgrace and 
disable my law, my experience, my discretion. What 
it pleaseth you, I pray, think of me : I am one that 
knows both mine own wants and other men's ; and it 
may be, perchance, that mine mend, when others 
stand at a stay. And surely I may not endure, in 



6 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

public place, to be wronged without repelling the same 
to my best advantage to right myself. You are 
great, and therefore have the more enviers, which 
would be glad to have you paid at another's cost. 
Since the time I missed the solicitor's place, the 
rather I think by your means, I cannot expect that 
you and I shall ever serve as attorney and solicitor 
together : but either to serve with another upon your 
remove, or to step into some other course ; so as I am 
more free than ever I was from any occasion of un- 
worthy conforming myself to you, more than general 
good manners, or your particular good usage shall 
provoke ; and if you had not been short-sighted in 
your own fortune, as I think you might have had 
more use of me. But that tide is passed. 

I write not this to shew my friends what a brave 
letter I have written to Mr. Attorney ; I have none 
of those humours; but that I have written is to a 
good end, that is, to the more decent carriage of my 
master's service, and to our particular better under- 
standing one of another. This letter, if it shall be an- 
swered by you in deed, and not in word, I suppose it 
will not be worse for us both ; else it is but a few lines 
lost, which for a much smaller matter I would have 
adventured. So this being to yourself, I for my part 
rest &c. 

IV 

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the vigorous English sati- 
rist who wrote Gulliver^ s Travels (1726), had returned to 
his native Ireland, after being disappointed in his ambition 
to gain a high position in the Church, and there was rapidly 
sinking into that sour and gloomy misanthropy which ended 
in his madness and death. This letter to his intimate friend, 



DEAN SWIFT 7 

Alexander Pope, voices the savage mood which, even before 
1725, was gradually growing habitual with Swift. 

Dean Swift to Alexander Pope 

September 29, 1725. 

I have employed my time (besides ditching) in 
finishing, correcting, amending, and transcribing my 
Travels [Gulliver's] in four parts complete, newly 
augmented and intended for the press when the world 
shall deserve them, or rather when a printer shall be 
found brave enough to venture his ears. I like the 
scheme of our meeting after distresses and dispersions. 

But the chief end I propose to myself in all my 
labors, is to vex the world, rather than divert it ; and 
if I could compass that design without hurting my own 
person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable 
writer you have ever seen without reading. I am ex- 
ceedingly pleased that you have done with transla- 
tions.4 Lord Treasurer Oxford ^ often lamented that a 
rascally world should lay you under a necessity of mis- 
employing your genius for so long a time. But since 
you will now be so much better employed, when you 
think of the world, give it one lash the more at my 
request. 

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and com- 
munities ; and my love is towards individuals. 

For instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers ; but I love 
Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one. 

It is so with physicians. I will not speak of my own 
trade, soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. 

But principally I hate and detest that animal called 
man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, 
and so forth. This is the system upon which I have 



8 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

governed myself many years (but do not tell), and so 
I shall go on until I have done with them. 

I have got materials toward a treatise proving the 
falsity of that definition animal rationale^ and to show 
it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great 
foundation of misanthropy (though not in Timon's^ 
manner) the whole building of my travels is erected ; 
and I never will have peace of mind till all honest 
men are of my opinion. 

By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, 
and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do 
so too. 

The matter is so clear, that it will admit of no dis- 
pute ; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and 
I agree in the point. 



Joseph Addison (1672-1719), not yet famous as the es- 
sayist of the Tatler and the Spectator, writes while trav- 
ehng on the Continent, to thank a friend for the gift of a 
snuffbox. This letter is one of the earliest in English litera- 
ture to show something of the ease and vivacity with which 
we have become familiar in modern letters. This is the more 
curious because Addison's correspondence in general is dull 
and commonplace. 

Joseph Addison to Chamberlain Dashwood 

Geneva : July, 1702. 
Dear Sir, — 

About three days ago Mr. Bocher put a very pretty 
snuffbox in my hand. I was not a little pleas'd to hear 
that it belonged to myself, and was much more so 
when I found it was a present from a Gentleman that 
1 have so great an honour for. You did not probably 



JOSEPH ADDISON 9 

foresee that it would draw on you y® trouble of a 
Letter, but you must blame yourself for it. For my 
part I can no more accept of a Snuffbox without re- 
turning my Acknowledgements, than I can take Snuff 
without sneezing after it. This last I must own to you 
is so great an absurdity that I should be ashamed to 
confess it, were not I in hopes of correcting it very 
speedily. I am observ'd to have my Box oft'ner in my 
hand than those that have been used to one these 
twenty years, for I can't forbear taking it out of my 
pocket whenever I think of Mr. Dashwood. You know 
Mr. Bays 7 recommends Snuff as a great provocative 
to Wit, but you may produce this Letter as a Stand- 
ing Evidence against him. I have since y^ beginning 
of it taken above a dozen pinches, and still find my- 
self much more inclin'd to sneeze than to jest. From 
whence I conclude that Wit and Tobacco are not in- 
separable, or to make a Pun of it, tho' a Man may be 
master of a snuffbox, 

Non cuicunque datum est habere Nasam.^ 

I should be afraid of being thought a Pedant for my 
Quotation did not I know that y^ Gentleman I am 
writing to always carries a Horace ^ in his pocket. But 
whatever you may think me, pray S^ do me y^ Justice 
to esteem me 

Your most &c. 

VI 

The first of these two letters of Richard Steele (1672- 
1729), the warm-hearted Irishman who originated the 
Taller (1709) and, in 1711, joined with Addison in editing 
the Spectator, was written to Miss Mary Scurlock, who, 
shortly after, became Steele's second wife. It is a fine illus- 
tration of the author's grace and charm of style. 



10 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

Richard Steele to Mary Scurlock 

September 1, 1707. 

It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love, 
and yet attend to business. 

As for me, all who speak to me find me out, and I 
must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. 

A gentleman asked me this morning, '' What news 
from Lisbon ? " and I answered, " She is exquisitely 
handsome." Another desired to know when I had 
been last at Hampton Court. I replied, " I will be on 
Tuesday come se'nnight." Pr'ythee, allow me at least 
to kiss your hand before that day, that my mind may 
be in some composure. O love ! 

A thousand torments dwell about thee ! 
Yet who would live to live without thee ? 

Methinks I could write a volume to you ; but all the 
language on earth would fail in saying how much, and 
with what disinterested passion, I am ever yours, 

EiCH. Steele. 

VII 

That the second Mrs. Steele turned him into a somewhat 
henpecked husband is quite evident from this hasty note, 
sent from a tavern where he was preparing for an evening 
of gayety. 

Richard Steele to Mrs. Steele 

Jan. 3, 1708, Devil Tavern, Temple-Bar. 
Dear Pkue 

I have partly succeeded in my business to-day and 
enclose two guineas as earnest of more. Dear Prue, I 



ALEXANDER POPE 11 

can't come home to dinner. I languish for your wel- 
fare and will never be a moment careless more. 

Your faithful husband, 
R: Steele. 
Send me word you have received this. 

VIII 

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the guest of Lord Boling- 
broke at the latter's country villa, writes to tell Dean 
Swift something of his manner of life. Most of Pope's letters 
have a touch of formality about them which iioes not add 
to their attractiveness ; in this case, however, his style is 
less studied than usual, possibly because he and Swift were 
very close friends. 

Alexander Pope to Dean Swift 

Dawley : June 28, 1728. 
I now hold the pen for my Lord Bolingbroke,^^ who 
is reading your letter between two haycocks, but his 
attention is somewhat diverted by casting his eyes on 
the clouds, not in admiration of what you say, but for 
fear of a shower. He is pleased with your placing him 
in the triumvirate between yourself and me ; though 
he says that he doubts he shaU fare like Lepidus ^^ 
— while one of us runs away with all the power, like 
Augustus, and another with all the pleasures, like An- 
tony. It is upon a foresight of this that he has fitted 
up his farm, and you will agree that his scheme of re- 
treat at least is not founded upon weak appearances. 
Upon his return from the Bath, all peccant humours 
he finds are purged out of him ; and his great temper- 
ance and economy are so signal, that the first is fit 
for my constitution, and the latter would enable you 



12 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

to lay up so much money as to buy a bishopric in Eng- 
land. As to the return of his health and vigour, were 
you here, you might inquire of his haymakers ; but as 
to his temperance, I can answer that (for one whole 
day) we have had nothing for dinner but mutton-broth, 
beans and bacon, and a barn-door fowl. 

Now his lordship is run after his cart, I have a mo- 
ment left to myself to tell you that I overheard him 
yesterday agree with a painter for £200 to paint his 
country-hall with trophies of rakes, spades, prongs, 
&c., and other ornaments, merely to countenance his 
calling this place a farm — now turn over a new leaf. 
— He bids me assure you he should be sorry not to 
have more schemes of kindness for his friends than of 
ambition for himself ; there, though his schemes may 
be weak, the motives at least are strong ; and he say§ 
further, if you could bear as great a fall and decrease 
of your revenues as he knows by experience he can, 
you would not live in Ireland an hour. 

The '' Dunciad " 12 jg going to be printed in all pomp, 
with the inscription, which makes me proudest. It 
will be attended with proeme, prolegomena, testimonia 
scriptorum, index authorum, and notes variorum. As 
to the latter, I desire you to read over the text, and 
make a few in any way you like best; whether dry 
raillery, upon the style and way of commenting of triv- 
ial critics ; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem ; 
or historical, of persons, places, times ; or explanatory, 
or collecting the parallel passages of the ancients. 
Adieu. I am pretty well, my mother not ill. 

Dr. Arbuthnot ^^ vexed with his fever by intervals ; I 
am afraid he declines, and we shall lose a worthy man s 
I am troubled about him very much : I am, &c. 



LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 13 



IX 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1690-1762), the most 
copious and brilliant woman letter-writer of the eighteenth 
century, was the wife of an English diplomat and passed 
much of her life in foreign countries. Many of her most 
interesting letters were sent from Turkey, to which country 
her husband was for a time ambassador, to her friends at 
home. The following letter, of the more formal essay type 
so common in the days of Pope and Addison, describes the 
Oriental method of inoculation for smallpox, a practice 
which Lady Montagu had the courage to introduce into 
England. 

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Mrs. S. C 



Adrianople : April 1, 1717. 

Li my opinion, Dear S , I ought rather to 

quarrel with you for not answering my Nimeguen let- 
ter of August till December, than to excuse my not 
writing again till now. I am sure there is on my side 
a very good excuse for silence, having gone such tire- 
some land journeys, though I don't find the conclusion 
of them so bad as you seem to imagine. I am very 
easy here, and not in the solitude you fancy me. The 
great number of Greeks, French, English, and Ital- 
ians, that are under our protection, make their court 
to me from morning till night; and I'll assure you, 
are many of them very fine ladies ; for there is no pos- 
sibility for a Christian to live easily under this govern- 
ment but by the protection of an ambassador — and 
the richer they are the greater is their danger. 

Those dreadful stories you have heard of the plague 
have very little foundation in truth. I own I have 
much ado to reconcile myself to the sound of a word 



14 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

which has always given me such terrible ideas, though I 
am convinced there is little more in it than in a fever. 
As a proof of this, let me teU you that we passed 
through two or three towns most violently affected. 
In the very next house where we lay (in one of those 
places) two persons died of it. Luckily for me I was 
so well deceived that I knew nothing of the matter ; 
and I was made believe, that our second cook who 
fell ill here had only a great cold. However, we left 
our doctor to take care of him, and yesterday they 
both arrived here in good health, and I am now let 
into the secret that he has had the plague. There are 
many that escape it ; neither is the air ever infected. 
I am persuaded that it would be as easy a matter to 
root it out here as out of Italy and France ; but it 
does so little mischief, they are not very solicitous 
about it, and are content to suffer this distemper in- 
stead of our variety, which they are utterly unac- 
quainted with. 

Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a 
thing that will make you wish yourself here. The 
small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here 
entirely harmless by the invention of ingrafting, which 
is the term they give it. There is a set of old women 
who make it their business to perform the operation 
every autumn, in the month of September, when the 
great heat is abated. People send to one another to 
know if any of their family has a mind to have the 
small-pox: they make parties for this purpose, and 
when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen to- 
gether), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of 
the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what 
vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips 



LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU 15 

open that you offer to her with a large needle (which 
gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and 
puts into the vein as much matter as can lye upon the 
head of her needle, and after that binds up the little 
wound with a hollow bit of shell ; and in this manner 
opens four or five veins. The Grecians have commonly 
the superstition of opening one in the middle of the 
forehead, one in each arm, and one on the breast, to 
mark the sign of the cross ; but this has a very ill ef- 
fect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not 
done by those that are not superstitious, who choose 
to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that 
is concealed. The children or young patients play to- 
gether all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health 
to the eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, 
and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three. 
They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their 
faces, which never mark ; and in eight days' time they 
are as well as before their illness. When they are 
wounded, there remain running sores during the dis- 
temper, which I don't doubt is a great relief to it. 
Every year thousands undergo this operation ; and the 
French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take 
the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take 
the waters in other countries. There is no example of 
any one that has died in it ; and you may believe that 
I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, 
since I intend to try it on my dear little son. 

I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this use- 
ful invention into fashion in England ; and I should 
not fail to write some of our doctors very particularly 
about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought 
had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable 



16 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

branch of their revenue for the good of mankind. But 
that distemper is too beneficial to them, not to expose 
to all their resentment the hardy wight that should 
undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps, if I live to 
return, I may, however, have courage to war with 
them. Upon this occasion admire the heroism in the 
heart of your friend, etc. etc. 



The letters of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773) 
to his natural son, Philip Dormer Stanhope, cover a period 
of nearly thirty years from 1738 to 1768, and reflect ac- 
curately the wit, the worldliness, and the graceful manners 
of the writer. Unfortunately the Earl was unsuccessful in 
his effort ^o teach his son ease and politeness, and the boy 
grew up incorrigibly awkward and stupid. 

The Earl of Chesterfield to his Son^ Philip 
Stanhope^ Esq. 

London ; November 24, 1747. 
Dear Boy, — 

As often as I write to you (and that you know is 
pretty often) so often am I in doubt whether it is to 
any purpose, and whether it is not labour and paper 
lost. This entirely depends upon the degree of reason 
and reflection which you are master of, or think proper 
to exert. If you give yourself time to think, and have 
sense enough to think right, two reflections must nec- 
essarily occur to you ; the one is, that I have a great 
deal of experience and that you have none ; the other 
is, that I am the only man living who cannot have, 
directly or indirectly, any interest concerning you, 
but your own. From which two undeniable principles, 



THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD 17 

the obvious and necessary conclusion is, that you 
ought, for your own sake, to attend to and follow my 
advice. 

If, by the application which I recommend to you, 
you acquire great knowledge, you alone are the gainer ; 
I pay for it. If you should deserve either a good or a 
bad character, mine will be exactly what it is now, and 
will neither be the better in the first case, nor the 
worse in the latter. You alone will be the gainer or 
the loser. 

Whatever your pleasures may be, I neither can nor 
shall envy you them, as old people are sometimes sus- 
pected, by young people, to do ; and I shall only la- 
ment, if they should prove such as are unbecoming a 
man of honour, or below a man of sense. But you will 
be the real sufferer, if they are such. As therefore it 
is plain that I have no other motive than that of 
affection in whatever I say to you, you ought to look 
upon me as your best, and for some years to come, 
your only friend. 

True friendship requires certain proportions of age 
and manners, and can never subsist where they are 
extremely different, except in the relations of parent 
and child ; where affection on one side, and regard on 
the other, make up the difference. The friendship 
which you may contract with people of your own age, 
may be sincere, may be warm ; but must be for some 
time reciprocally unprofitable, as there can be no ex- 
perience on either side. 

The young leading the young, is like the blind 
leading the blind ; " they will both fall into the ditch." 
The only sure guide is he who has often gone the road 
which you want to go. Let me be that guide: who 



18 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

have gone all roads ; and who can consequently point 
out to you the best. If you ask me why I went any of 
the bad roads myself, I will answer you very truly, 
tliat is for want of a good guide ; ill example invited 
me one way, and a good guide was wanting to show 
me a better. But if anybody, capable of advising me, 
had taken the same pains with me, which I have taken, 
and will continue to take with you, I should have 
avoided many follies and inconveniences, which undi- 
rected youth ran me into. My father was neither able 
nor desirous to advise me ; which is what I hope you 
cannot say of yours. You see that I make use only of 
the word advise ; because I would much rather have 
the assent of your reason to my advice, than the sub- 
mission of your will to my authority. This, I persuade 
myself, will happen, from that degree of sense which 
I think you have ; and therefore I will go on advis- 
ing, and with hopes of success. You are now settled 
for some time at Leipsic : the principal object of your 
stay there is the knowledge of books and sciences ; 
which if you do not, by attention and application, make 
yourself master of while you are there, you will be ig- 
norant of them all the rest of your life : and take my 
word for it a life of ignorance is not only a very con- 
temptible, but a very tiresome one. Redouble your 
attention then, to Mr Harte, in your private studies 
of the Literae Humaniores,!* especially Greek. State 
your difficulties whenever you have any ; do not 
suppress them either from mistaken shame, lazy 
indifference or in order to have done the sooner. Do 
the same with Professor Mascow, or any other pro- 
fessor. 

When you have thus usefully employed your morn- 



THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD 19 

ings, you may with a safe conscience divert yourself 
in the evenings, and make those evenings very useful 
too, by passing them in good company, and, by obser- 
vation and attention, learning as much of the world 
as Leipsic can teach you. You will observe and imi- 
tate the manners of the people of the best fashion 
there ; not that they are (it may be) the best man- 
ners in the world; but because they are the best 
manners of the place where you are, to which a man 
of sense always conforms. The nature of things is 
always and everywhere the same ; but the modes of 
them vary, more or less, in every country ; and an 
easy and genteel conformity to them, or rather the 
assuming of them at proper times, and in proper 
places, is what particularly constitutes a man of the 
world, and a well-bred man. 

Here is advice enough, I think, and too much, it 
may be, you will think, for one letter ; if you follow 
it, you will get knowledge, character, and pleasure by 
it ; if you do not, I only lose operam et oleum^^^ 
which, in all events, I do not grudge you. 

I send you^ by a person who sets out this day for 
Leipsic, a small packet from your Mamma, contain- 
ing some valuable things which you left behind, to 
which I have added, by way of New Year's gift, a 
very pretty tooth-pick case ; and, by the way, pray 
take great care of your teeth, and keep them ex- 
tremely clean. I have likewise sent yo.u the Greek 
roots, lately translated into English from the French 
of the Port Royal.^^ Inform yourself what the Port 
Royal is. To conclude with a quibble ; I hope you will 
not only feed upon these Greek roots, but likewise 
digest them perfectly. Adieu. 



20 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

XI 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), attending the meeting of 
the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, writes to assure 
a friend in England of the temper of the American people. 

Benjamin Franldin to Joseph Priestley 

Philadelphia, 3 October, 1775. 
Dear Sir: — 

I am to set out to-morrow for the camp, and, hav- 
ing JQst heard of this opportunity, can only write a 
line to say that I am w^ell and hearty. Tell our dear 
good friend. Dr. Price, who sometimes has his doubts 
and despondencies about our firmness, that America 
is determined and unanimous ; a very few Tories and 
placemen excepted, who will probably soon export 
themselves. Britain, at the expense of three millions, 
has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, 
which is twenty thousand pounds a head; and at 
Bunker's Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of 
which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed 
Hill. During the same time sixty thousand children 
have been born in America. From this data his 
mathematical head will easily calculate the time and 
expense necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole 

territory. My sincere respects to , and to the club 

of honest Whigs at . Adieu. I am ever your 

most affectionately, 

B. Franklin, 

XII 

Samuel Johnson (1709-84), after several years of priva- 
tion in Grub Street, was engaged in 1747 by a group of 
London booksellers to prepare a Dictionary of the English 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 21 

Language^ the Prospectus for which Johnson addressed to 
the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield, from motives of his 
own, refused to receive the struggling author, and accord- 
ingly Johnson, resolute in his independence, brought out his 
work in 1755 without a Dedication. On the eve of its publi- 
cation, Chesterfield printed in the World two papers recom- 
mending the Dictionary and praising it highly. In reply 
Johnson sent the nobleman the following letter, the digni- 
fied scorn of which has made it celebrated in our literature. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson to the Earl of Chesterfield 

February, 1755. 

My Lord, — 

I have been lately informed by the proprietor of 
the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary 
is recommended to the publick, were written by your 
Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, 
being very little accustomed to favours from the great, 
I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to 
acknowledge. 

When, upon some slight encouragement, I first 
visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the 
rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address ; 
and could not forbear to wish that I might boast. my- 
self Le vainqueur du vainqueitr de la terre}'^ — that 
I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world 
contending ; but I found my attendance so little en- 
couraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer 
me to continue it. When I had once addressed your 
Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of 
pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can 
possess. I had done all that I could ; and no man is 
well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so 
little. 



22 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I 
waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from 
your door ; during which time I have been pushing on 
my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to 
complain, and have brought it at last, to the verge of 
publication, without one act of assistance, one word 
of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treat- 
ment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron be- 
fore. The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted 
with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. 

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with un- 
concern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, 
when he has reached ground, encumbers him with 
help ? The notice which you have been pleased to take 
of my labours, had it been early, had been kind ; but 
it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot 
enjoy it ; tiU I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till 
I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very 
cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no 
benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the 
publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, 
which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. 

Having carried on my work thus far with so little 
obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be 
disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be 
possible, with less ; for I have been long wakened from 
that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself 
with so much exultation, 

My Lord 
Your Lordship's most humble 

most obedient servant 
Sam. Johnson. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 23 

XIII 

Dr. Johnson perceived at once that the so-called " Ossianic 
poems," printed by James Macpherson (1736-96), a Scotch 
schoolmaster, as translations from the ancient Gaelic lan- 
guage, were really Macpherson's own work, and did not 
hesitate to express his opinion freely. In response to an in- 
dignant protest from Macpherson, Johnson sent him the fol- 
lowing angry retort. 

Dr, Samuel Johnson to Mr. Macpherson 

Mr. James Macpherson, — 

I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any 
violence offered to me I shall do my best to repel ; 
and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for 
me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting 
what I think to be a cheat, by the menaces of a 
ruffian. 

What would you have me retract ? I thought your 
book an imposture ; I think it an imposture still. For 
this opinion I have given my reasons to the public, 
which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. 
Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formida- 
ble ; and what I hear of your morals inclines me to 
pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you 
shall prove. You may print this if you will. 

Sam. Johnson. 

XIV 

Horace Walpole (1717-97), the third son of Sir Robert 
Walpole, took little part in public affairs, but devoted him- 
self largely to collecting curios and writing unusual books. 
His intimate knowledge of court life and his fondness for 
gossip made him an admirable chronicler of the events going 



24 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

on around l|im in politics and society, and his Memoirs are 
therefore of permanent value. In his large correspondence 
— nearly three thousand letters of his exist — he showed 
himself a witty and entertaining man of the world, and he 
was among the first to reveal the possibilities of the letter 
as a literary type. With all their grace and charm, how- 
ever, his letters have a touch of formality, and were evi- 
dently intended for publication. The first one here printed 
presents a chatty description of the events attending the 
coronation of George III. 

The Honourable Horace Walpole to George Montagu 

Arlington Street : November 13, 1760. 

Even the honeymoon of a new reign don't produce 
events every day. There is nothing but the common 
saying of addresses and kissing hands. The chief diffi- 
culty is settled; Lord Gower yields the mastership 
of the horse to Lord Huntington, and removes to the 
great wardrobe, from whence Sir Thomas Robinson 
was to have gone into EUis' place, but he is saved. 
The city, however, have a mind to be out of humour ; 
a paper has been fixed on the Royal Exchange, with 
these words, — "No petticoat government, no Scotch 
minister,i8 no Lord George Sackville " ; ^^ two hints to- 
tally unfounded, and the other scarce true. No petti- 
coat ever governed less, it is left at Leicester House; 
Lord George's breeches are as little concerned ; and 
except Lady Susan Stuart and Sir Harry Erskine, 
nothing has yet been done for any Scots. For the 
King 20 himself, he seems all good nature, and wishing 
to satisfy everybody ; all his speeches are obliging. 

I saw him again yesterday, and was surprised to 
find the levee-room had lost so entirely the air of the 
lion's den. This sovereign don't stand in one spot, 



HORACE WALPOLE 25 

with his eyes fixed royally on the ground, and drop- 
ping bits of German news; he walks about, and speaks 
to everybody. I saw him afterwards on the throne 
where he is graceful and genteel, sits with dignity and 
reads his answers to addresses well ; it was the Cam- 
bridge address, carried by the Duke of Newcastle 21 
in his doctor's gown, and looking like the Medecin 
malgre luiJ^^ He had been vehemently solicitous for 
attendance for fear my Lord Westmoreland, who 
vouchsafes himself to bring the address from Oxford, 
should outnumber him. Lord Litchfield and several V 
other Jacobites have kissed hands ; George Selwyn 
says, " They go to St. James', because now there are 
so many Stuarts there." 

Do you know, I had the curiosity to go to the bury- 
ing 23 t' other night ; I had never seen a royal funeral ; 
nay, I walked as a rag of quality, which I found 
would be, and so it was, the easiest way of seeing it. 
It is absolutely a noble sight. The Prince's chamber, 
hung with purple, and a quantity of silver lamps, the 
coffin under a canopy of purple velvet, and six vast 
chandeliers of silver on high stands, had a very good 
effect. The ambassador from Tripoli and his son were 
carried to see that chamber. 

The procession, through a line of foot-guards, every 
seventh man bearing a torch, the horse-guards lining 
the outside, their officers with drawn sabres and crape 
sashes on horseback, the drums muffied, the fifes, bells 
tolling, and minute guns, — all this was very solemn. 
But the charm was the entrance of the abbey,^^ where 
we were received by the dean and chapter in rich 
robes, the choir and almsmen bearing torches ; the 
whole abbey so illuminated, that one saw it to greater 



26 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

advantage than by day; the tombs, long aisles, and 
fretted roof, all appearing distinctly, and with the hap- 
piest chiaro scuro. There wanted nothing but incense, 
and little chapels here and there, with priests saying 
mass for the repose of the defunct ; yet one could not 
complain of its not being Catholic enough. I had been 
in dread of being coupled with some boy of ten years 
old ; but the heralds were not very accurate, and I 
walked with George Grenville, taller and older, to 
keep me in countenance. When we came to the Chapel 
of Henry the Seventh, all solemnity and decorum 
ceased; no order was observed, people sat or stood 
where they could or would ; the Yeomen of the Guard 
were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense 
weight of the coffin ; the bishop read sadly and blun- 
dered in the prayers ; the fine chapter, Man that is 
born of a woman^ was chanted, not read ; and the an- 
them, besides being immeasurably tedious, would have 
served as well for a nuptial. The real serious part 
was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland,^^ height- 
ened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. He had 
a dark brown adonis, and a cloak of black cloth, with 
a train of five yards. 

Attending the funeral of a father could not be 
pleasant : his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand 
upon it near two hours ; his face bloated and distorted 
with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, 
one of his eyes ; and placed over the mouth of the 
vault into which, in all probability, he must himself 
so soon descend ; think how unpleasant a situation ! 
He bore it all with a firm and unaffected counte- 
nance. This grave scene was fuUy contrasted by the 
burlesque Duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of 



HORACE WALPOLE 27 

crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung 
himself back in a stall, the archbishop hovering over 
him with a smelling-bottle ; but in two minutes his 
curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran 
about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was 
not there, spying with one hand, and mopping his eyes 
with the other. Then returned the fear of catching 
cold ; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking 
with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning 
round, found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing 
upon his train, to avoid the chill of the marble. It 
was very theatric to look down into the vault, where 
the coffin was, attended by mourners with lights. 
Clavering, the groom of the bed-chamber, refused to 
sit up with the body, and was dismissed by the King's 
order. 

I have nothing more to tell you, but a trifle, a very 
trifle. The King of Prussia has totally defeated Mar- 
shal Daun.26 This which would have been prodigious 
news a month ago, is nothing to-day ; it only takes its 
turn among the questions, " Who is to be groom of the 
bed-chamber ? What is Sir T. Kobinson to have ? " I 
have been to Leicester fields to-day ; the crowd was 
immoderate ; I don't believe it will continue so. Good 
night. 

XV 

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), the author of The Vicar 
of Wakefield (1766) and The Deserted Village (1770), 
was careless, impractical, and improvident, seldom in funds 
and usually in debt. When money came his way, however, 
he was generous to both relatives and friends ; and this let- 
ter shows his whole-hearted liberality towards his brother 
and sister at a time when he himself was none too rich. 



28 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

Oliver Goldsmith to Maurice Goldsmith 

January, 1770. 

Dear Brother, — 

I should have answered your letter sooner, but, in 
truth, I am not fond of thinking of the necessities of 
those I love, when it is so very little in my power to 
help them. I am sorry to find you are in every way 
unprovided for ; and what adds to my uneasiness is, 
that I have received a letter from my sister Johnson, 
by which I learn that she is pretty much in the same 
circumstances. As to myself, I believe I think I could 
get both you and my poor brother-in-law something 
like that which you desire, but 1 am determined never 
to ask for little things, nor exhaust any little interest 
I may have, until I can help you, him, and myself 
more effectually. As yet, no opportunity has offered ; 
but I believe you are pretty well convinced that I will 
not be remiss when it arrives. 

The King has lately been pleased to make me pro- 
fessor of Ancient History in the royal academy of 
painting 2^ which he has just established, but there is 
no salary annexed ; and I took it rather as a compli- 
ment to the institution than any benefit to myself. 
Honours to one in my situation are something like 
ruffles to one that wants a shirt. 

You tell me there are fourteen or fifteen pounds left 
me in the hands of my cousin Lawder, and you ask 
me what I would have done with them. My dear 
brother, I would by no means give any directions to 
my dear worthy relations at Kilmore how to dispose 
of money which is, properly speaking, more theirs than 
mine. All that I can say is, that I entirely, and this 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 29 

letter will serve to witness, give up any right and title 
to it ; and I am sure they will dispose of it to the best 
advantage. To them I entirely leave it ; whether they 
or you may think the whole necessary to fit you out, 
or whether our poor sister Johnson may not want the 
half, I leave entirely to their and your discretion. The 
kindness of that good couple to our shattered family 
demands our sincerest gratitude; and, though they 
have almost forgotten me, yet, if good things at last 
arrive, I hope one day to return and increase their 
good-humour by adding to my own. 

I have sent my cousin Jenny a miniature picture of 
myself, as I believe it is the most acceptable present 
I can offer. I have ordered it to be left for her at 
George Faulkner's, folded in a letter. 

The face you well know is ugly enough, but it is 
finely painted. I will shortly also send my friends 
over the Shannon some mezzo-tint prints of myself, 
and some more of my friends here, such as Burke, John- 
son, Eeynolds, and Colman.^^ I believe I have writ- 
ten a hundred letters to different friends in your 
country, and never received an answer to any of them. 
I do not know how to account for this, or why they 
are unwilling to keep up for me those regards which 
I must ever retain for them. 

If, then, you have a mind to oblige me, you will write 
often, whether I answer you or not. Let me particularly 
have the news of our family and old acquaintances. 
For instance, you may begin by telling me about the 
family where you reside, how they spend their time, 
and whether they ever make mention of me. Tell me 
about my mother, my brother Hodson and his son, my 
brother Harry's son and daughter, my sister Johnson, 



30 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

the family of Ballyoughter, what is become of them, 
where they live, and how they do. You talked of 
being my only brother. I don't understand you. 
Where is Charles? A sheet of paper occasionally 
filled with the news of this kind would make me very 
happy, and would keep you nearer my mind. As it is, 
my dear brother, believe me to be 

Yours, most affectionately, 

Oliver Goldsmith. 

XVI 

William Cowper (1731-1800) is, in the opinion of his 
editor, Thomas Wright, " the greatest of English letter- 
writers," and even if we cannot quite give him that high 
position, he must be ranked among the very first. Cowper's 
originality, playfulness, delicacy, and shrewdness make his 
correspondence such delightful reading that it is difficult to 
know what letters to select as characteristic of the man. 
The first letter chosen has the advantage of illustrating 
Cowper's critical opinions, and introduces another view of 
Dr. Johnson. 

William Cowper to the JR ever end William Unwin 

Oct. 31, 1779. 
My dear Friend, — 

I wrote my last letter merely to inform you that I 
had nothing to say ; in answer to which you have said 
nothing. I admire the propriety of your conduct, 
though I am a loser by it. I will endeavour to say 
something now, and shall hope for something in re- 
turn. 

I have been well entertained with Johnson's biog- 
raphies, for which I thank you : with one exception, 
and that a swingeing one, I think he has acquitted him- 



WILLIAM COWPER 31 

self with his usual good sense and sufficiency. His 
treatment of Milton is unmerciful to the last degree. 
A pensioner is not likely to spare a republican ; and 
the Doctor, in order, I suppose, to convince his royal 
patron of the sincerity of his monarchical principles, has 
belaboured that great poet's character with the most 
industrious cruelty. As a man, he has hardly left him 
the shadow of one good quality. Churlishness in his 
private life, and a rancorous hatred of everything 
royal in his public, are the two colours with which he 
has smeared all the canvas. If he had any virtues, 
they are not to be found in the Doctor's picture of 
him ; and it is well for Milton, that some sourness in 
his temper is the only vice with which his memory 
has been charged ; it is evident enough that if his 
biographer could have discovered more, he would not 
have spared him. As a poet, he has treated him with 
severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the 
most beautiful feathers out of his Muse's wing and 
trampled them under his great foot. He has passed 
sentence of condemnation upon " Lycidas," ^ and has 
taken occasion, from that charming poem, to expose 
to ridicule (what is indeed ridiculous enough) the 
childish prattlement of pastoral compositions, as if 
''Lycidas" was the prototype and pattern of them 
all. The liveliness of the description, the sweetness of 
the numbers, the classical spirit of antiquity that pre- 
vails in it, go for nothing. I am convinced, by the 
way, that he has no ear for poetical numbers, or that 
it was stopped by prejudice against the harmony of 
Milton's. Was there ever anything so delightful as the 
music of the " Paradise Lost " ? It is like that of a 
fine organ ; has the fullest and the deepest tones of 



32 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

majesty, with all the softness and elegance of the 
Dorian flute. Variety without end and never equalled, 
unless, perhaps, by Virgil. Yet the Doctor has little or 
nothing to say upon this copious theme, but talks some- 
thing about the unfitness of the English language for 
blank verse, and how apt it is, in the mouth of some 
readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh! 1 could 
thresh his old jacket, until I made his pension jingle 
in his pocket. 

I could talk a good while longer, but I have no 
room ; our love attends yourself, Mrs. Unwin, and 
Miss Shuttleworth, not forgetting the two miniature 
pictures at your elbow. — Yours affectionately, 

w. c. 

XVII 

Cowper's best letters were written to his friends, Mrs. 
Unwin and Lady Hesketh, with whom he was on delight- 
fully confidential terms. His life was apparently secluded 
and uneventful, but he succeeded in making even insig- 
nificant things interesting to others. In this, perhaps, more 
than in anything else, lies the genuine charm of his corre- 
spondence. 

William Cowper to Lady Hesketh 

May 29, 1786. 
Thou dear, comfortable cousin, whose letters, among 
all that I receive, have this property peculiarly their 
own, that I expect them without trembling, and never 
find anything in them that does not give me pleasure ; 
for which therefore I would take nothing in exchange 
that the world could give me, save and except that for 
which I must exchange them soon (and happy shall I 
be to do so,) your own company. That, indeed, is de- 



WILLIAM COWPER 33 

layed a little too long ; to my impatience at least it 
seems so, who find the spring, backward as it is, too 
forward, because many of its beauties will have faded 
before you will have an opportunity to see them. We 
took our customary walk yesterday in the wilderness 
at Weston, and saw, with regret, the laburnums, syrin- 
gas, and guelder-roses, some of them blown, and others 
just upon the point of blowing, and could not help 
observing — all these will be gone before Lady Hesketh 
comes ! Still however there will be roses and jasmine, 
and honey-suckle, and shady walks, and cool alcoves, 
and you will partake them with us. But I want you 
to have a share of every thing that is delightful here, 
and cannot bear that the advance of the season should 
steal away a single pleasure before you can come to 
enjoy it. 

Every day I think of you, almost all the day long ; I 
will venture to say, that even you were never so expected 
in your life. I called last week at the Quaker's to see 
the furniture of your bed, the fame of which had 
reached me. It is, I assure you, superb, of printed 
cotton, and the subject classical. Every morning you 
will open your eyes on Phaeton kneeling to Apollo, 
and imploring his father to grant him the conduct of 
his chariot for a day. May your sleep be as sound as 
your bed will be sumptuous, and your nights at least 
will be well provided for. 

I shall send up the sixth and seventh books of the 
Iliad ^ shortly, and shall address them to you. You will 
forward them to the General. I long to show you my 
workshop, and to see you sitting on the opposite side 
of the table. We shall be as close packed as two wax 
figures in an old fashioned picture frame. I am writ- 



34 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

ing in it now. It is the place in which I fabricate aU my 
verse in summer time. I rose an hour sooner than 
usual this morning, that I might finish my sheet 
before breakfast, for I must write this day to the 
General. 

The grass under my windows is all bespangled with 
dewdrops, and the birds are singing in the apple trees, 
among the blossoms. Never poet had a more commodi- 
ous oratory in which to invoke his Muse. 

I have made your heart ache too often, my poor 
dear cousin, with talking about my fits of dejection. 
Something has happened that has led me to the subject, 
or I would have mentioned them more sparingly. Do not 
suppose, or suspect that I treat you with reserve ; there 
is nothing in which I am concerned that you shall not 
be made acquainted with. But the tale is too long for 
a letter. I will only add, for your present satisfaction, 
that the cause is not exterior, that it is not within the 
reach of human aid, and that yet I have a hope myself, 
and Mrs. Unwin a strong persuasion of its removal. I 
am indeed even now, and have been for a considerable 
time, sensible of a change for the better, and expect, 
with good reason, a comfortable lift from you. Guess, 
then, my beloved cousin, with what wishes I look for- 
ward to the time of your arrival, from whose coming 
I promise myself not only pleasure, but peace of mind, 
— at least an additional share of it. At present it is an 
uncertain and transient guest with me ; but the joy with 
which I shall see and converse with you at Olney, may 
perhaps make it an abiding one. 

w. c. 



JOHN ADAMS 35 

XVIII 

John Adams (1735-1826), a short time before his inaug- 
uration as second President of the United States, writes his 
wife concerning some interesting matters of domestic econ- 
omy. The curious form of salutation, "My Dearest Friend,'' 
occurs repeatedly in letters of this period between husband 
and wife. 

John Adams to his Wife 

Philadelphia, 4 February, 1797. 
My Dearest Friend, 

I hope you wiU not communicate to anybody the 
hints I give you about our prospects ; but they appear 
every day worse and worse. House rent at twenty- 
seven hundred dollars a year, fifteen hundred dollars 
for a carriage, one thousand for one pair of horses, all 
the glasses, ornaments, kitchen furniture, the best 
chairs, settees, plateaus, &c., all to purchase, all the 
china, delph or wedge wood, glass and crockery of every 
sort to purchase, and not a farthing probably will the 
House of Representatives allow, though the Senate 
have voted a small addition. All the linen besides. I 
shall not pretend to keep more than one pair of horses 
for a carriage, and one for a saddle. Secretaries, serv- 
ants, wood, charities which are demanded as rights, 
and the million dittoes present such a prospect as is 
enough to disgust anyone. Yet not one word must we 
say. 

We cannot go back. We must stand our ground as 
long as we can. Dispose of our places with the help 
of our friend Dr. Tufts, as well as you can. We are 
impatient for news, but that is always so at this 
season. I am tenderly your 

J. A. 



36 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

XIX 

In the pathetic letter which follows, Robert Burns 
(1759-96), the marvelously gifted but unfortunate Scotch 
poet, applies for a minor position in the excise. He received 
the desired appointment in 1789 ; but it only offered a fur- 
ther encouragement to his intemperate habits, and he died, 
poor and neglected, in 1796. 

Hobert Burns to the Earl of Glencairn 

Edinburgh: 1787. 
My Lord, — 

I know your lordship will disapprove of my ideas 
in a request I ara going to make to you ; but I have 
weighed, long and seriously weighed, my situation, my 
hopes and turn of mind, and am fully fixed to my 
scheme if I can possibly effectuate it. I wish to get 
into the Excise. I am told that your lordship's inter- 
est will easily procure me the grant from the Commis- 
sioners ; and your lordship's patronage and goodness, 
which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretch- 
edness, and exile, embolden me to ask that interest. 
You have likewise put it in my power to save the lit- 
tle tie of home that sheltered an aged mother, two 
brothers, and three sisters froin destruction. There, 
my lord, you have bound me over to the highest grati- 
tude. My brother's farm is but a wretched lease, but 
I think he will probably weather out the remaining 
seven years of it ; and after the assistance which I 
have given and will give him, to keep the family to- 
gether, I think, by my guess, I shall have rather bet- 
ter than two hundred pounds, and instead of seeking 
what is almost impossible at present to find, a farm 
that I can certainly live by, with so small a stock, I 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 37 

shall lodge this sum in a banking-house, a sacred de- 
posit, excepting only the calls of uncommon distress 
or necessitous old age. 

These, my lord, are my views : I have resolved from 
the maturest deliberation ; and now I am fixed, I shall 
leave no stone unturned to carry my resolve into execu- 
tion. Your lordship's patronage is the strength of my 
hopes ; nor have I yet applied to any body else. Indeed 
my heart sinks within me at the idea of applying to any 
other of the great who have honoured me with their 
countenance. I am ill-qualified to dog the heels of great- 
ness with the impertinence of solicitation, and trem- 
ble nearly as much at the thought of the cold promise 
as the cold denial ; but to your lordship I have not 
only the honour, the comfort, but the pleasure of being 
Your lordship's much obliged 
And deeply indebted humble servant, 

E. B. 

XX 

Walter Scott (1771-1832), at this date known as the au- 
thor of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion 
(1808), writes this letter of praise to a brother poet, George 
Crabbe (1754-1832), who had published his Parish Regis- 
ter in 1807. Scott's largeness of mind and heart shows it- 
self in this enthusiastic recognition of another's work. 
* 

Sir Walter Scott to George Crahhe 

AsHESTiEL : October 2, 1809. 

Dear Sir, — 

I am just honoured with your letter, which gives 
me the more sensible pleasure, since it has gratified a 
wish of more than twenty years' standing. It is, I 
think, fully that time since I was for great part of a 



38 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 



\ 



very snowy winter, the inhabitant of an old house in 
the country, in a course of poetical study, so very like 
that of your admirably-painted " Young Lad," that I 
could hardly help saying " That 's me ! " when I was 
reading the tale to my family. Among the very few 
books which fell under my hands was a volume or two 
of Dodsley's Annual Hegister^ one of which contained 
copious extracts from The Village and The Library ^^^ 
particularly the conclusion of book first of the former, 
and an extract from the latter, beginning with the 
description of the old romancers. I committed them 
most faithfully to my memory, where your verses must 
have felt themselves very strangely lodged in company 
with ghost stories, border riding ballads, scraps of old 
plays, and all the miscellaneous stuff which a strong 
appetite for reading, with neither means nor discrim- 
ination for selection, had assembled in the head of a 
lad of eighteen. New publications at that time were 
very rare in Edinburgh, and my means of procuring 
them very limited; so that, after a long search for 
the poems which contained these beautiful specimens, 
and which had afforded me so much delight, I was 
fain to rest contented with the extracts from the Regis- 
ter^ which I could repeat at this moment. You may, 
therefore, guess my sincere delight when I saw your 
poems at a later period assume the rank in the public 
consideration which they so well deserve. It was a 
triumph to my own immature taste to find I had an- 
ticipated the applause of the learned and of the critical, 
and I became very desirous to offer my gratulor^ 
among the more important plaudits which you have 
had from every quarter. I should certainly have 
availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship (for 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 39 

our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Ab- 
horson's), to address to you a copy of a new poetical 
attempt whicb I have now upon the anvil, and esteem 
myself particularly obliged to Mr. Hatchard and to 
your goodness acting upon his information, for giving 
me the opportunity of paving the way for such a free- 
dom. I am too proud of the compliments you honour 
me with, to affect to decline them ; and with respect 
to the comparative view I have of my own labours 
and yours, I can only assure you that none of my lit- 
tle folks, about the formation of whose taste and 
principles I may be supposed naturally solicitous, have 
ever read any of my own poems, while yours have 
been our regular evening's amusement. My eldest girl 
begins to read well, and enters as well into the humour 
as into the sentiment of your admirable descriptions 
of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has seldom 
existed among those who know by experience, that 
there are much better things in the world than liter- 
ary reputation, and that one of the best of these good 
things is the regard and friendship of those deservedly 
and generally esteemed for their worth or their talents. 
I believe many dilettanti authors do cocker themselves 
up into a great jealousy of anything that interferes 
v/ith what they are pleased to call their fame, but I 
should as soon think of nursing one of my own fingers 
into a whitlow for my private amusement, as encour- 
aging such a feeling. I am truly sorry to observe you 
mention bad health. Those who contribute so much to 
the improvement as well as the delight of society 
should escape this evil. I hope, however, that one day 
your state of health may permit you to view this coun- 
try, I have very few calls to London, but it will 



40 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

greatly add to the interest of those which may occur, 
that you will permit me the honour of waiting upon 
you in my journey, and assuring you, in person, of the 
early admiration and sincere respect with which I have 
the honour to be, dear Sir, yours, &c., 

Walter Scott. 

XXI 

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), the witty and brilliant edi- 
tor of the Edinburgh Review, was a favorite in society and 
an intellectual leader of his time. As a preacher in London 
he was exceedingly influential, and his Flymley Letters 
helped to further the movement for Catholic emancipation. 
The Lady Georgiana Morpeth to whom this letter is ad- 
dressed was the wife of the Earl of Carlisle, and the mother 
of a boy whom Smith had tutored in Edinburgh. 

Sydney Smith to Lady Georgiana Morpeth 

FosTON, Dec. 1st, 1821. 
Dear Lady Georgiana, — 

How is Lord Carlisle? Pray do not take it for 
inattention that I do not call oftener,' but it is 
rather too far to walk, and I hate riding. Next 
year I shall set up a gig, and then I shall call at 
Castle Howard twice a day all the year round, like 
an apothecary. I have just finished Miss Aitkin's 
Memoirs of Queen Elizabeth^ a pretty book, which I 
counsel you to let your daughters read, if they have 
not read it five years ago. I am in low spirits about 
the Malton road. I must go over to Malton so often, 
and it will be so troublesome. All my hay-stacks and 
corn-ricks are blown away by this wind, two of my 
maids are married, and the pole of my carriage is 



SYDNEY SMITH 41 

broken ! These are the sort of things which render 
life so difficult. 

Yours, dear Lady Georgiana, 

Sydney Smith. 

XXII 

This note from Sydney Smith to a girl friend of his is an 
example of a type of letter which becomes more common 
later in the century, notably in the letters of Dickens and 
of Stevenson. 

Sydney Smith to Miss 

London, July 22d, 1835. 

Lucy, Lucy, my dear child, don't tear your frock ; 
tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius ; but 
write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts ; 
be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest ; and then 
integrity or laceration of frock is of little import. 

And Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You 
know, in the first sum of yours I ever saw, there was a 
mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to 
do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. 
Is this a trifle ? What would life be without arithmetic 
but a scene of horrors? 

You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled 
by men who never understood arithmetic ; by the time 
you return, I shall probably have received my first 
paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection 
of you ; therefore I now give you my parting advice. 
Don't marry anybody who has not a tolerable under- 
standing and a thousand a year, and God bless you, 
dear child, 

Sydney Smith. 



42 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 



XXIII 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the author of 
The Ancient Mariner^ was a poet of marvelous endow- 
ment who became a slave to opium and, under the influence 
of German thinkers, devoted much of his life to philosophi- 
cal and theological speculation, thus disappointing the hopes 
of those who knew his splendid imaginative and poetic 
power. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and numbered 
among his friends Lamb, Southey, Wordsworth, and other 
able men of his time, during his later years becoming the 
center of a group of talented disciples. This letter, written 
to Godwin, the father-in-law of Shelley and the author of 
Political Justice, illustrates Coleridge's weakness and the 
vagaries of his intellect. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to William Godwin 

At Mr. Lamb's, 36, Chapel Street, 
March 3, 1800. 

Dear Godwin, — 

The punch, after the wine, made me tipsy last 
night. This I mention, not that my head aches, or that 
I felt, after I quitted you, any unpleasantness or titu- 
bancy ; but because tipsiness has, and has always, one 
unpleasant effect — that of making me talk very ex- 
travagantly ; and as, when sober, I talk extravagantly 
enough for any common tipsiness, it becomes a mat- 
ter of nicety in discrimination to know when I am or 
am not affected. An idea starts up in my head, — 
away I follow through thick and thin, wood and marsh, 
brake and briar, with all the apparent interest of a 
man who was defending one of his old and long-estab- 
lished principles. Exactly of this kind was the conver- 
sation with which I quitted you. I do not believe it pos- 



CHARLES LAMB 43 

sible for a human being to have a greater horror of the 
feelings that usually accompany such principles as I 
then supposed, or a deeper conviction of their irration- 
ality, than myself ; but the whole thinking of my life 
will not bear me up against the accidental crowd and 
press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its 
natural pitch. We shall talk wiselier with the ladies 
Tuesday. God bless you, and give your dear little ones 
a kiss apiece from me. Yours with affectionate esteem, 

S. T. Coleridge. 

XXIV 

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) shows in his correspondence 
the same oddities, the same charm, and the same picturesque 
style that appear in his Essays of Elia, Like the letters of 
Byron, Lamb's letters give full expression to the personality 
of the writer, and in this lies their great merit. The first 
letter, to Wordsworth, describes Lamb's sensations on re- 
tiring from his position as clerk in the India House, a place 
which he had filled for thirty-three years. 

Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth 

CoLEBROOK Cottage, 
April 6, 1825. 

Dear Wordsworth, — 

I have been several times meditating a letter to you 
concerning the good thing which has befallen me, but 
the thought of poor Monkhouse came across me. He was 
one that I had exulted in the prospect of congratula- 
ting me. He and you were to have been the first partici- 
pators, for indeed it has been ten weeks since the first 
motion of it. Here I am then, after thirty-three years' 
slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this 
finest of aU April mornings, a freed man^ with 441<£ 



44 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as 
John Dennis,^^ who outlived his annuity and starved at 
ninety ; 441X i.e., 450X, with a deduction of 9X for a 
provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the 
pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, etc. 

I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last 
week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition over- 
whelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. 
Every year to be as long as three, i.e., to have three 
times as much real time (time that is my own) in it ! 
I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling 
I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and 
I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holy- 
days, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; 
their conscious f ugitiveness ; the craving after making 
the most of them. Now, when all is holyday, there are 
no holydays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, with- 
out a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steady- 
ing, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my 
own master, as it has been irksome to have had a 
master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure 
feeling that some good has happened to us. 

Leigh Hunt ^3 and Montgomery 34 after their release- 
ments, describe the shock of their emancipation much 
as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames. I eat, drink, 
and sleep as sound as ever. I lay no anxious schemes 
for going hither and thither, but take things as they 
occur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles ; to-day 
I write a few letters. Pleasuring was for fugitive 
play-days ; mine are fugitive only in the sense that life 
is fugitive. Freedom and life are co-existent! . . . 

C. Lamb. 



BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON 45 

XXV 

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), artist and critic, 
was the friend of many of the prominent literary men of 
his time, including Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, 
Hazlitt, Hunt, and Scott. This letter to Miss Mary Russell 
Mitford (1787-1855), the author of Our Village, is full of 
interesting gossip about poets whom Haydon actually knew 
in the flesh. 

Benjamin Robert Haydon to Miss Mitford 

[1824.] 
You are unjust, depend upon it, in your estimate 
of Byron's poetry, and wrong in your ranking Words- 
worth beyond him. There are things in Byron's poetry 
so exquisite, that fifty or five hundred years hence they 
will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I 
grant that Wordsworth is very pure and very holy, 
and very orthodox, and occasionally very elevated, 
highly poetical, and oftener insufferably obscure, 
starched, dowdy, anti-human and anti-sympathetic, but 
he will never be ranked above Byron nor classed with 
Milton, he will not, indeed. He wants the constructive 
power, the lucidus ordo of the greatest minds, which 
is as much a proof of the highest order as any other 
quality. I dislike his selfish Quakerism ; his affectation 
of superior virtue ; his utter insensibility to the frailties 
— the beautiful frailties of passion. I was once walk- 
ing with him in Pall Mall ; we darted into Christie's.^^ 
A copy of the Transfiguration was at the head of 
the room, and in the corner a beautiful copy of the 
Cupid and Psyche [statues] kissing. Cupid is taking 
her lovely chin, and turning her pouting mouth to 



46 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

meet his while he archly bends his own down, as if 
saying, " Pretty dear ! " You remember this exquisite 
group? . . . Catching sight of the Cupid, as he and I 
were coming out, Wordsworth's face reddened, he 
showed his teeth, and then said in a loud voice, " The 
Dev-v-v-vils ! " There 's a mind ! Ought not this ex- 
quisite group to have roused his " Shapes of Beauty," 
and have softened his heart as much as his old grey- 
mossed rocks, his withered thorn, and his dribbling 
mountain streams ? I am altered about Wordsworth, 
very much, from finding him a bard too elevated to 
attend to the music of humanity. No, No ! give me 
Byron, with all his spite, hatred, depravity, dandyism, 
vanity, frankness, passion, and idleness, to Words- 
worth, with all his heartless communion with woods 
and grass. 

When he came back from his tour, I breakfasted 
with him in Oxford Street. He read Laodamia ^^ to 
me, and very finely. He had altered, at the suggestion 
of his wife, Laodamia's fate (but I cannot refer to it 
at this moment), because she had shown such weak- 
ness as to wish her husband's stay. Mrs. Wordsworth 
held that Laodamia ought to be punished, and pun- 
ished she was. I will refer to it. Here it is — 

She whom a trance of passion thus removed, 
As she departed, not without the crime 
Of lovers, who, in reason's spite have loved, 
Was doomed to wander in a joyless clime 
Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers 
Of blissful quiet in Elysian bowers. 

I have it in his own hand. This is different from 
the first edition. And as he repeated it with self-ap- 
probation of his own heroic feelings for banishing a 



BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON 47 

wife because she felt a pang at her husband going to 
hell again, his own wife sat crouched by the fire-place 
and chanted every line to the echo, apparently con- 
gratulating herself at being above the mortal frailty 
of loving her William. 

You should make allowance for Byron's not liking 
Keats. He could not. Keats's poetry was an immortal 
stretch beyond the mortal intensity of his own. An 
intense egotism, as it were, was the leading exciter of 
Byron's genius. He could feel nothing for fauns or 
satyrs, or gods, or characters past^ unless the associa- 
tion of them were excited by some positive natural 
scene where they had actually died, written, or fought. 
All his poetry was the result of a deep feeling roused 
by what passed before his eyes. Keats was a stretch 
beyond this. Byron could not enter into it any more 
than he could Shakespeare. He was too frank to con- 
ceal his thoughts. If he really admired Keats he would 
have said so (I am afraid I am as obscure here as 
Wordsworth). So, in his controversy with Bowles ; ^7 
Byron really thought Pope the greater poet. He pre- 
tended that a man who versified the actual vices or 
follies was a greater, and more moral poet than he 
who invented a plot, invented characters which by their 
action on each other produced a catastrophe from 
which a moral was inferred. This at once showed the 
reach of his genius. 

XXVI 

No English letter-writer is more easy, more spontaneous, 
and more varied than Lord Byron (1788-1824). In his 
correspondence with his friends he reveals himself frankly 
and fully, without pretense or artificiality, and with a vivac- 



48 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

ity that is delightful. The formal letter in the manner of 
the essay, used by Pope, Swift, and Lady Montagu, and 
not altogether abandoned by Walpole and Cowper, has, in 
Byron's letters, been replaced by a new literary form, the 
virtue of which lies chiefly in its flexibility, its gossipy tone, 
and its autobiographical interest. The first letter, to Thomas 
Moore, the Irish poet and Byron's biographer, shows the 
jocular spirit in which the nobleman announced his ap- 
proaching marriage to Miss Milbanke, a marriage which 
proved to be the most unfortunate step in Byron's life. 

Lord Byron to Thomas Moore 

Newstead Abbey, Sept. 20, 1814. 

" Here 's to her who long 

Hath waked the poet's sigh ! 
The girl who gave to song 
What gold could never buy." 

My dear Moore, — 

I am going to be married — that is, I am accepted, 
and one usually hopes the rest will follow. My mother 
of the Gracchi (that are to be), you think too strait- 
laced for me, although the paragon of only children, and 
invested with " golden opinions of all sorts of men," 
and full of " most blest conditions " as Desdemona 
herself. Miss Milbanke is the lady, and I have her 
father's invitation to proceed there in my elect capac- 
ity, — which, however, 1 cannot do till I have settled 
some business in London, and got a blue coat. 

She is said to be an heiress, but of that I really 
know nothing certainly, and shall not enquire. But I 
do know, that she has talents and excellent qualities; 
and you will not deny her judgment, after having re- 
fused six suitors and taken me. 

Now, if you have anything to say against this, pray 



LORD BYRON 49 

do ; my mind's made up, positively fixed, determined, 
and therefore I will listen to reason, because now it 
can do no harm. Things may occur to break it off, 
but I will hope not. In the mean time, I tell you (a secret^ 
by the by, — at least, till I know she wishes it to be 
public) that I have proposed and am accepted. You 
need not be in a hurry to wish me joy, for one mayn't 
be married for months. I am going to town to-morrow : 
but expect to be here, on my way there, within a fort- 
night. 

If this had not happened, I should have gone to 
Italy. In my way down, perhaps, you will meet me 
at Nottingham, and come over with me here. I need 
not say that nothing will give me greater pleasure. I 
must, of course, reform thoroughly; and, seriously, if 
I can contribute to her happiness, I shall secure my 
own. She is so good a person, that — that — in short, 
I wish I was a better. Ever, etc. 

XXVII 

Much of Byron's correspondence with his publisher, John 
Murray, is of exceptional interest, for it is filled, not only 
with business details, but also with the poet's views and ex- 
periences. This letter was written when Byron, at the height 
of his power, was working on Don Juan, the poem in which 
he finally attained maturity in thought and style. 

Lord Byron to John Murray 

Venice, April 6, 1819. 
Dear Sir, — 

The Second Canto of Don Juan was sent, on Satur- 
day last, by post, in 4 packets, two of 4, and two of 
three sheets each, containing in all two hundred and 
seventeen stanzas, octave measure. But I will permit 



50 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

no curtailments, except those mentioned about Castle- 
reagli and the two Bohs ^^ in the Introduction. You 
sha'n't make Canticles of my Cantos. The poem wiU 
please, if it is lively ; if it is stupid, it will fail ; but 
I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing. 
If you please, you may publish anonymously ; it will 
perhaps be better ; but I will battle my way against 
them all, like a Porcupine. 

So you and Mr. Foscolo,39 etc., want me to under- 
take what you call a "great work?" an Epic poem, 
I suppose, or some such pyramid. I '11 try no such 
thing ; I hate tasks. And then " seven or eight years !" 
God send us all well this day three months, let alone 
years. If one's years can't be better employed than in 
sweating poesy, a man had better be a ditcher. And 
works, too ! — is Childe Harold ^^ nothing ? You have 
so many " divine " poems, is it nothing to have 
written a Human one ? without any of your worn-out 
machinery. Why, man, I could have spun the thoughts 
of the four cantos of that poem into twenty, had I 
wanted to book-make, and its passion into as many 
modern tragedies. Since you want lengthy you shall 
have enough of Juan^ for I '11 make 50 cantos. 

And Foscolo, too ! Why does he not do something 
more than the Letters of Ortis^ and a tragedy, and pam- 
phlets ? He has good fifteen years more at his command 
than I have : what has he done all that time ? — proved 
his Genius, doubtless, but not fixed its fame, nor done 
his utmost. 

Besides, I mean to write my best work in Italian^ 
and it will take me nine years more thoroughly to 
master the language ; and then if my fancy exist, and 
I exist too, I will try what I can do really. As to the 



LORD BYRON 51 

Estimation of the Englisli whicli you talk of, let them 
calculate what it is worth, before they insult me with 
their insolent condescension. 

I have not written for their pleasure. If they are 
pleased, it is that they choose to be so ; I have never 
flattered their opinions, nor their pride ; nor will I. 
Neither will I make " Ladies books " al dilettar le 
femme e la plehe. ^^ I have written from the fullness 
of my mind, from passion, from impulse, from many 
motives, but not for their " sweet voices." 

I know the precise worth of popular applause, for 
few Scribblers have had more of it ; and if I chose to 
swerve into their paths, I could retain it, or resume 
it, or increase it. But I neither love ye, nor fear ye ; 
and though I buy with ye and sell with ye, and talk 
with ye, I will neither eat with ye, drink with ye, nor 
pray with ye. They made me, without my search, a 
species of popular Idol ; they, without reason or judge- 
ment, beyond the caprice of their good pleasure, threw 
down the Image from its pedestal ; it was not broken 
with the fall, and they would, it seems, again replace 
it — but they shall not. 

You ask about my health ; about the beginning of 
the year I was in a state of great exhaustion, attended 
by such debility of Stomach that nothing remained 
upon it ; and I was obliged to reform my " way of 
life," which was conducting me from the ''yellow 
leaf "^2 to the Ground, with all deliberate speed. I 
am better in health and morals, and very much yours 
ever, Bn. 

P.S. — Tell Mrs. Leigh I have never had "my 
Sashes," and I want some tooth-powder, the red, by 
all or any means. 



5^ SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

XXVIII 

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), settled with his wife 
and family in Italy, writes to encourage John Keats to visit 
him, offering to receive his brother poet as his guest. Shelley 
at this time had already published his two great poems, 
.Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, besides many of his 
wonderful lyrics. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley to John Keats 

Pisa, 27 July, 1820. 
My dear Keats, — 

I hear with great pain the dangerous accident you 
have undergone, and Mr. Gisborne, who gives me the 
account of it, adds that you continue to wear a con- 
sumptive appearance. This consumption is particularly 
fond of people who write such good verses as you have 
done, and with the assistance of an English winter it 
can often indulge its selection. I do not think that 
young and amiable poets are bound to gratify its taste ; 
they have entered into no bond with the muses to that 
effect. But seriously (for I am joking on what I am 
very anxious about) I think you would do well to pass 
the winter in Italy and avoid so tremendous an acci- 
dent, and if you think it as necessary as I do, so long 
as you continue to find Pisa or its neighbourhood 
agreeable to you, Mrs. Shelley unites with myself in 
urging the request that you would take up your resi- 
dence with us. You might come by sea to Leghorn 
(France is not worth seeing, and the sea is particularly 
good for weak lungs), which is within a few miles of 
us. You ought, at all events, to see Italy, and your 
health which I suggest as a motive, may be an excuse 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 53 

to you. I spare declamation about the statues, and 
paintings, and ruins, and what is a greater piece of 
forbearance, about the mountains and streams and 
fields, the colours of the sky, and the sky itself. 

I have lately read your Endymion ^^ again, and even 
with a new sense of the treasures of poetry it contains, 
though treasures poured forth with indistinct profu- 
sion. This people in general will not endure, and that 
is the cause of the comparatively few copies which 
have been sold. I feel persuaded that you are capable 
of the greatest things, so you but will. I always tell 
Oilier to send you copies of my books. Prometheus 
Unbound I imagine you will receive nearly at the 
same time with this letter. The Cenci I hope you 
have already received — it was studiously composed 
in a different style. 

"Behold the good how far! but far above the 
greatr 

In poetry I have sought to avoid system and man- 
nerism. I wish those who excel me in genius would 
pursue the same plan. 

Whether you remain in England, or journey to 
Italy, believe that you carry with you my anxious 
wishes for your health, happiness and success wherever 
you are, or whatever you undertake, and that I am, 
Yours sincerely, 

P. B. Shelley. 

XXIX 

The response of John Keats (1795-1821) to Shelley's 
invitation is somewhat indefinite ; as a matter of fact, al- 
though Keats finally succeeded in reaching Italy, he never 
arrived in Pisa, but died of consumption at Rome very 



54 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

shortly after settling in that city. His tragic death moved 
Shelley to compose his immortal elegy, Adonais. 

John Keats to Percy Bysshe Shelley 

Hampstead, August, 1820. 
My dear Shelley, — 

I am very much gratified that you, in a foreign 
country, and with a mind almost over-occupied, should 
write to me in the strain of the letter beside me. If I 
do not take advantage of your invitation, it will be 
prevented by a circumstance I have very much to 
heart to prophesy. There is no doubt that an English 
winter would put an end to me, and do so in a linger- 
ing hateful manner. Therefore, I must either voyage 
or journey to Italy, as a soldier marches up to a 
battery. My nerves at present are the worst part of 
me, yet they feel soothed that, come what extreme 
may, I shall not be destined to remain in one spot 
long enough to take a hatred of any four particular 
bedposts. I am glad you take any pleasure in my 
poor poem, which I would willingly take the trouble 
to unwrite, if possible, did I care so much as I have 
done about reputation. I received a copy of The 
Cenci^ as from yourself, from Hunt. There is only 
one part of it I am judge of — the poetry and dram- 
atic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is con- 
sidered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must 
have a purpose, which may be the God. An artist 
must serve Mammon ; he must have " self-concentra- 
tion" — selfishness, perhaps. You, I am sure, will 
forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might 
curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and 
load every rift of your subject with ore. The thought 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 55 

of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, 
who perhaps never set with your wings furled for six 
months together. And is this not extraordinary talk 
for the writer of Endymion^ whose mind was like a 
pack of scattered cards ? I am picked up and sorted 
to a pip. My imagination is a monastery, and I am 
its monk. I am in expectation of Prometheus every 
day. Could I have my wish efifected, you would have 
it still in manuscript, or be now putting an end to the 
second act. I remember you advising me not to pub- 
lish my first blights on Hampstead Heath. I am re- 
turning advice upon your hands. Most of the poems 
in the volume I send you, have been written above 
two years, and would never have been published but 
for hope of gain ; so you see I am inclined enough to 
take your advice now. I must express once more my 
deep sense of your kindness, adding my sincere thanks 
and respects for Mrs. Shelley. In the hope of soon 
seeing you, I remain most sincerely yours, 

John Keats. 

XXX 

While in Italy, Shelley carried on a most entertaining 
correspondence with Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), 
the author of several whimsical, but exceedingly witty nov- 
els. Many of the letters contain intimate details describing 
the members of the so-called Pisan circle of literary people ; 
in the one printed here, something is said of Lord Byron 
and the manner of his life in Italy. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock 

Ravenna, August, 1821. 
My dear Peacock, — 

I received your last letter just as I was setting oflf 

from the Bagni on a visit to Lord Byron at this place. 



56 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

Many thanks for all your kind attention to my accursed 
affairs. I am happy to tell you that my income is 
satisfactorily arranged, although Horace Smith hav- 
ing received it, and being still on his slow journey 
through France, I cannot send you, as I wished to 
have done, the amount of my debt immediately, but 
must defer it till I see him or till my September 
quarter, which is now very near. — I am very much 
obliged to you for your way of talking about it — but 
of course, if I cannot do you any good, I will not per- 
mit you to be a sufferer by me. — 

I have sent you by the Gisbornes a copy of the 
Elegy on Keats. The subject, I know, will not please 
you ; but the composition of the poetry, and the taste 
in which it is written, I do not think bad. You and 
the enlightened public will judge. Lord Byron is in 
excellent tone both of health and spirits. He has got 
rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which 
he indulged at Venice. He lives with one woman, a 
lady of rank here, to whom he is attached, and who is 
attached to him, and is in every respect an altered 
man. He has written three more cantos of Don Juan. 
I have yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every 
word of it is pregnant with immortality. 1 have not 
seen his late plays, except Marino Faliero^^ which is 
very well, but not so transcendently fine as the Don 
Juan. Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite 
contrary to my usual custom, but one must sleep or 
die, like Southey's sea-snake in Kehama^^ at 12. 
After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six till 
eight we gallop through the pine forests which divide 
Ravenna from the sea ; we then come home and dine, 
and sit up gossiping until six in the morning. I don't 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 57 

suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but 
I shall not try it longer. Lord B's establishment con- 
sists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous 
dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and 
a falcon ; and all these, except the horses, walk about 
the house, which every now and then resounds with 
their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the mas- 
ters of it. Lord B. thinks you wrote a pamphlet signed 
''John Bull"; he says he knew it by the style re- 
sembling Meliacourt^^ of which he is a great ad- 
mirer. I read it, and assured him that it could not 
possibly be yours. I write nothing, and probably 
shall write no more. It offends me to see my name 
classed among those who have no name. If I cannot 
be something better, I had rather be nothing, and the 
accursed cause to the downfall of which I dedicate 
what powers I may have had — flourishes like a cedar 
and covers England with its boughs. My motive was 
never the insane desire of fame ; and if I should con- 
tinue an author, I feel that I should desire it. This 
cup is justly given to one only of an age ; indeed, par- 
ticipation would make it worthless : and unfortunate 
they who seek it and find it not. 

I congratulate you — I hope I ought to do so — on 
your expected stranger. He is introduced into a rough 
world. My regards to Hogg, and Coulson if you see 
him. Ever most faithfully yours, 

P. B. S. 

After I have sealed my letter, I find that my enu- 
meration of the animals in this Circean ^^ Palace was 
defective, and that in a material point. I have just 
met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea 
hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these 



58 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

animals were before they were changed into these 
shapes. 

XXXI 

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), the author of Sartor 
Hesartus, Heroes and Hero Worship, The French Bevo- 
littion, etc., although somewhat irascible and crotchety by 
nature, had at bottom a sturdy manhood which shows itself 
in this letter to Benjamin Disraeli, who, as Prime Minister, 
had offered him the choice of the Grand Cross of the Bath 
or a baronetcy and a pension. The spirit of Carlyle's reply 
is not unlike that of Johnson's Letter to Chesterfield 
(page 21) ; but it must be remembered that Johnson, unlike 
Carlyle, did actually accept a pension from the king. 

Thomas Carlyle to Benjamin Disraeli 

5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 
December 29, 1874. 

Sir, — 

Yesterday, to my great surprise, I had the honour 
to receive your letter containing a magnificent pro- 
posal for my benefit, which will be memorable to me 
for the rest of my life. Allow me to say that the 
letter, both in purport and expression, is worthy to be 
called magnanimous and noble, that it is without ex- 
ample in my poor history ; and I think it is unexam- 
pled, too, in the history of governing persons towards 
men of letters at the present, as at any time; and 
that I will carefully preserve it as one of the things 
precious to memory and heart. A real treasure or 
benefit, independent of all results from it. 

This said to yourself and reposited with many feel- 
ings in my own grateful mind, I have only to add 
that your splendid and generous proposals for my 
practical behoof, must not any of them take effect ; 



THOMAS HOOD 59 

that titles of honour are, in all degrees of them, out 
of keeping with the tenour of my own poor existence 
hitherto in this epoch of the world, and would be an 
encumbrance, not a furtherance to me; that as to 
money, it has, after long years of rigorous and frugal, 
but also (thank God, and those who are gone before 
me) not degrading poverty, become in this latter time 
amply abundant, even superabundant ; so that royal 
or other bounty would be more than thrown away in 
my case ; and in brief, that except the feeling of your 
fine and noble conduct on this occasion, which is a 
real and permanent possession, there cannot anything 
be done that would not now be a sorrow rather than 
a pleasure. 

With thanks more than usually sincere, 
I have the honour to be. Sir, 

Your obliged and obedient servant, 

T. Carlyle. 

XXXII 

Thomas Hood (1799-1845), poet and wit, struggled dur- 
ing most of his short life with disease and misfortune, but 
his courage never failed him and his letters, many of them 
written in times of depression, are filled with kindliness and 
humor. An example of his playfulness is this letter to May 
Elliot, a little girl favorite of his. It should be compared 
with Sydney Smith's letter to Lucy (page 41), which is 
equally witty but has less of the true comic spirit. 

Thomas Hood to May 

17, Elm Tree Road, St. John's Wood, 
Monday, April, 1844. 

My dear May, — 

I promised you a letter, and here it is. I was sure 
to remember it ; for you are as hard to forget, as you 



60 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

are soft to roll down a hill with. What fun it was ! 
only so prickly, I thought I had a porcupine in one 
pocket, and a hedgehog in the other. The next time, 
before we kiss the earth, we will have its face shaved 
well. Did you ever go to Greenwich Fair? I should 
like to go there with you, for I get no rolling at St. 
John's Wood. Tom and Fanny only like roll and 
butter, and as for Mrs. Hood, she is for rolling in 
money. 

Tell Dunnie that Tom has set his trap in the bal- 
cony and has caught a cold, and tellJeanie that Fanny 
has set her foot in the garden, but it has not come up 
yet. Oh, how I wish it was the season when " March 
winds and April showers bring forth May flowers ! " 
for then of course you would give me another pretty 
little nosegay. Besides it is frosty and foggy weather, 
which I do not like. The other night, when I came 
from Stratford, the cold shriveled me up so, that 
when I got home, I thought I was my own child ! 

However, I hope we shall all have a merry Christ- 
mas ; I mean to come in my most ticklesome waist- 
coat, and to laugh till I grow fat, or at least streaky. 
Fanny is to be allowed a glass of wine, Tom's mouth 
is to have a AoZe holiday, and Mrs. Hood is to sit up 
for supper ! There will be doings ! And then such good 
things to eat ; but, pray, pray, pray, mind they don't 
boil the baby by a mistake for a plump pudding, in- 
stead of a plum one. 

Give my love to everybody, from yourself down to 
Willy, with which and a kiss, I remain, up hill and 
down dale, 

Your affectionate lover, 

Thomas Hood. 



THOMAS HOOD 61 

XXXIII 

Sir Robert Peel, the English Premier, had arranged that 
Hood^s pension of one hundred pounds should be transferred 
to Mrs. Hood, and the poet writes, almost on his deathbed, 
to thank him. His indomitable cheerfulness appears in the 
closing pun, which proved to be practically his last. 

Thomas Hood to Sir JRohert Peel 

1845. 
Dear Sir, — 

We are not to meet in the flesh. Given over by my 
physicians and myself, I am only kept alive by frequent 
instalments of mulled port wine. In this extremity I 
feel a comfort, for which I cannot refrain from again 
thanking you, with all the sincerity of a dying man, 
— and, at the same time, bidding you a respectful 
farewell. 

Thank God my mind is composed and my reason 
undisturbed, but my race as an author is run. My 
physical debility finds no tonic virtue in a steel pen, 
otherwise I would have written one more paper — a 
forewarning one — against an evil, or the danger of it, 
arising from a literary movement in which I have had 
some share, a one-sided humanity, opposite to that 
Catholic Shaksperian sympathy, which felt with King 
as well as Peasant, and duly estimated the mortal temp- 
tations of both stations. Certain classes at the poles 
of society are already too far asunder ; it should be 
the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly 
attraction, not to aggravate the existing repulsion, and 
place a wider moral gulf between Rich and Poor, with 
Hate on the one side and Fear on the other. But I am 



62 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

too weak for this task, the last I had set myself ; it is 
death that stops my pen, you see, and not the pension. 
God bless you, sir, and prosper all your measures 
for the benefit of my beloved country. 

I have the honor to be. Sir, 
Your most grateful and obedient servant, 

Thos. Hood. 

XXXIV 

In the following letter, Thomas Babington Macaulay 
(1800-59), then a comparatively unknown young man, 
writes of a visit to the eminent wit and divine, Sydney 
Smith (page 40). 

Thomas Macaulay to his Father 

Bradford: July 26, 1826. 
My dear Father, — 

On Saturday I went to Sydney Smith's. His parish 
lies three or four miles out of any frequented road. 
He is, however, most pleasantly situated. " Fifteen 
years ago," said he to me as I alighted at the gate of 
his shrubbery, '' I was taken up in Piccadilly and set 
down here. There was no house, and no garden ; noth- 
ing but a bare field." One service this eccentric divine 
has certainly rendered to the Church. He has built 
the very neatest, most commodious, and most appro- 
priate rectory that I ever saw. All its decorations are 
in a peculiarly clerical style, grave, simple, and gothic. 
The bedchambers are excellent, and excellently fitted 
up ; the sitting-rooms handsome ; and the grounds 
sufficiently pretty. Tindal and Parke (not the judge 
of course), two of the best lawyers, best scholars, and 
best men in England, were there. We passed an ex- 



THOMAS MACAULAY 63 

tremely pleasant evening, had a very good dinner, and 
many amusing anecdotes. 

After breakfast the next morning 1 walked to church 
with Sydney Smith. The edifice is not at all in keep- 
ing with the rectory. It is a miserable little hovel with 
a wooden belfry. It was, however, well filled, and with 
decent people, who seemed to take very much to their 
pastor. 1 understand that he is a very respectable 
apothecary; and most liberal of his skill, his medicine, 
his soup, and his wine, among the sick. He preached a 
very queer sermon — the former half too familiar and 
the latter half too florid, but not without some inge- 
nuity of thought and expression. 

Sydney Smith brought me to York on Monday morn- 
ing, in time for the stage-coach which runs to Skipton. 
We parted with many assurances of good-will. I have 
really taken a great liking to him. He is full of wit, hu- 
mor, and shrewdness. He is not one of those show- 
talkers who reserve all their good things for special 
occasions. It seems to be his greatest luxury to keep his 
wife and daughter laughing two or three hours every 
day. His notions of law, government, and trade are sur- 
prisingly clear and just. His misfortune is to have chosen 
a profession at once above him and below him. Zeal 
would have made him a prodigy ; formality and bigotry 
would have made him a bishop ; but he could neither 
rise to the duties of his order, nor stoop to its degra- 
dations. 

He praised my articles in the Edinburgh Review ^^ 
with a warmth which I am willing to believe sincere, 
because he qualified his compliments with several very 
sensible cautions. My great danger, he said, was that 
of taking a tone of too much asperity and contempt 



64 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

in controversy. I believe that he is right, and I shall 
try to mend. 

Ever affectionately yours, 

T. B. M. 

XXXV 

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-66), wife of Thomas Carlyle, 
carried on a copious correspondence with many friends and 
relatives. This letter, written from Chelsea, where she and 
her husband had their home for many years, gives an idea 
of some of their domestic difficulties. 

Jane Welsh Carlyle to Mrs. Welsh 

5 Cheyne Walk, 

February 23, 1842. 

I am continuing to mend. If I could only get a 

good sleep, I should be quite recovered ; but, alas ! we 

are gone to the devil again in the sleeping apartment. 

That dreadful woman next door, instead of putting 

away the cock which was so pathetically appealed 

against, has produced another. The servant has ceased 

to take charge of them. They are stuffed with ever so 

many hens into a small hencoop every night, and left 

out of doors the night long. Of course they are not 

comfortable, and of course they crow and screech not 

only from daylight, but from midnight, and so near 

that it goes through one's head every time like a 

sword. The night before last they woke me every 

quarter of an hour, but I slept some in the intervals ; 

for they had not succeeded in arousing him above. 

But last night they had him up at three. He went to 

bed again, and got some sleep after, the " horrors '' 

not recommencing their efforts until five ; but I, lis- 



JANE WELSH CARLYLE 65 

tening every minute for a new screech that would 
send him down a second time and prepare such 
wretchedness for the day, could sleep no more. 

What is to be done, God knows ! If this goes on, 
he will soon be in Bedlam ; and I too, for anything I 
see to the contrary : and how to hinder it from going 
on ? The last note we sent the cruel woman would not 
open. I send for the maid and she will not come. I 
would give them guineas for quiet, but they prefer 
tormenting us. In the law there is no resource in 
such cases. They may keep beasts wild in their back 
yard if they choose to do so. Carlyle swears he will 
shoot them, and orders me to borrow Mazzini's gun. 
Shoot them with all my heart if the consequences 
were merely having to go to a police officer and pay 
the damage. But the woman would only be irritated 
thereby in getting fifty instead of two. If there is to 
be any shooting, however, I will do it myself. It will 
sound better my shooting them on principle than his 
doing it in a passion. 

This despicable nuisance is not at all unlikely to 
drive us out of the house after all, just when he had 
reconciled himself to stay in it. How one is vexed with 
little things in this life ! The great evils one triumphs 
over bravely, but the little eat away one's heart. 

XXXVI 

A rugged nobility and somber earnestness lend distinc- 
tion to this tragic letter from John Sterling (1806-44), 
the essayist, to his friend and biographer, Carlyle. It 
should be compared with Hood's letter to Peel (page 61), 
also written on a deathbed and at very nearly the same 
time. 



66 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

John Sterling to Thomas Carlyle 

August 10, 1844. 
My dear Carlyle, — 

For the first time for many months it seems possi- 
ble to send you a few words ; merely, however, for re- 
membrance and farewell. On higher matters there is 
nothing to say. I tread the common road into the 
great darkness, without any thought of fear and with 
very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none. 
With regard to You and Me I cannot begin to write, 
having nothing for it but to keep shut the lids of those 
secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. 
Towards me it is still more true than towards Eng- 
land that no man has been and done like you. Heaven 
bless you ! If I can lend a hand when there, that will 
not be wanting. It is all very strange, but not a hun- 
dredth part so sad as it seems to the standers-by. 
Your wife knows my mind towards her, and will be- 
lieve it without asservation. 

Yours to the last, 

John Sterling. 

XXXVII 

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92), the " Quaker Poet," 
became, after the publication of Snow-Bound in 1866, a 
popular public character. In this letter to Lucy Larcom, 
his sister's dearest friend, he complains good-naturedly of 
newspaper gossip. 

John Greenleaf Whittier to Lucy Larcom 

Amesbury, 10th mo., 30, 1876. 
No, I am not going to Newburyport. It is passing 
droll to see how the newspapers dispose of me this 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 67 

season. First, I am domiciled at Peabody ; next, I 
was buying a residence in Portland ; then I was dwell- 
ing in my cottage at the Shoals, secluded from every- 
body ; then I am spending the summer at Martha's 
Vineyard as the guest of Dr. Somebody whom I never 
heard of ; and now it seems I am in Newburyport ! 
Was there ever such a Wandering Jew ? A fellow in 
New York, the son of a United States Senator, wrote 
me not long ago that as he understood I was well off 
and had a summer cottage on the Isles of Shoals, he 
wished me to let him have f 200, as he was very hardly 
pressed for money ! I wish I could go to sleep and 
wake up and find myself in the West Indies or Lower 
California. My cousins, the Cartlands, are located at 
Newburyport. They have bought and fitted up the 
house at the corner of High Street and Broad, where 
they will be glad to see thee. 

XXXVIII 

The letters of Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), like his 
speeches, have, at their best, a dignity, simplicity, and 
directness that stamp them as masterpieces. The specimen 
printed here, sent in reply to a critical and somewhat im- 
patient attack on the government policy printed in the New 
York Tribune^ is a spirited defense and explanation of the 
President's attitude towards the great public questions then 
at issue. 

Abraham Lincoln to Horace Greeley 

Executive Mansion, Washington, 
August 22, 1862. 

Hon. Horace Greeley : 

Dear Sir, — I have just read yours of the 19th, 
addressed to myself through the New York Tribune. 



C8 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

If there be in it any statements or assumptions of fact 
which I may know to be erroneous, I do not, now and 
here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences 
which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not, now 
and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible 
in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in 
deference to an old friend whose heart I have always 
supposed to be right. 

As to the policy I " seem to be pursuing," as you 
say, I have not meant to leave anyone in doubt. 

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest 
way under the constitution. The sooner the national 
authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be 
the " Union as it was." If there be those who would 
not save the Union unless they could at the same time 
save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be 
those who would not save the Union unless they could 
at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with 
them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save 
the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy 
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing 
any slave, I would do it ; and if I could do it by freeing 
all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I could save it by 
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do 
that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I 
do because I believe it helps to save the Union ; and 
what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it 
would help to save the Union. I shall do less when- 
ever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, 
and I shall do more whenever I shall believe that 
doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct 
errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt 
new views so fast as they shall appear to be true 
views. 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 69 

I have stated my purpose according to my view of 
official duty ; and I intend no modification of my oft- 
expressed wish that all men everywhere could be 
free. 

Yours, 

A. Lincoln. 

XXXIX 

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), the genial author of 
the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Tahle and of numerous 
poems, was ordinarily a poor correspondent. This letter, 
however, written while he was traveling in Canada, has 
much of the quiet humor which appears in his essays. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes to James T. Fields 

Montreal, October 23, 1867. 
Dear Mr. Fields, — 

... I am as comfortable here as can be, but I have 
earned my money, for I have had a full share of my 
old trouble. Last night was better, and to-day I 'm 
going about the town. Miss Frothingham sent me a 
basket of black Hamburg grapes to-day, which were 
very grateful after the hotel tea and coffee and other 
'pothecary's stuff. 

Don't talk to me about taverns ! There is just one 
genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to 
be had in them, — namely, a boiled ^gg. The soups taste 
pretty good sometimes, but their sources are involved in 
a darker mystery than that of the Nile. Omelets taste 
as if they had been carried in the waiter's hat or fried 
in an old boot. I ordered scrambled eggs one day. It 
must be that they had been scrambled for hy somebody ^ 
but who — who in the possession of a sound reason 



70 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

could have scrambled for what I had set before 
me under that name? Butter! I am thinking just 
now of those excellent little pellets I have so often 
seen at your table, and wondering why the taverns 
always keep it until it is old. Fool that I am ! As if 
the taverns did not know that if it was good it would 
be eaten, which is not what they want. Then the waiters 
with their napkins — what don't they do with those 
napkins ! Mention any one thing of which you think 
you can say with truth, " That they do not do." . . . 
I have a really fine parlor, but every time I enter 
it I perceive that 

" Still sad < odor ' of humanity " ^9 

which clings to it from my predecessor. Mr. Hogan 
got home yesterday, I believe. I saw him for the first 
time to-day. He was civil — they all are civil. I have 
no fault to find except with taverns here and pretty 
much everywhere. 

Every six months a tavern should burn to the 
ground, with all its traps, its " properties," its beds and 
pots and kettles, and start afresh from its ashes like 
John Phoenix-Squibob ! 

No : give me home, or a home like mine, where all 
is clean and sweet, where coffee has pre-existed in the 
berry, and tea has still faint recollections of the pig- 
tails that dangled about the plant from which it was 
picked, where butter has not the prevailing character 
which Pope assigned to Denham, where soup could 
look you in the face if it had " eyes " (which it has 
not), and where the comely Anne or the gracious 
Margaret takes the place of those napkin-bearing 
animals. 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 71 

Enough ! But I have been forlorn and ailing and 
fastidious — but I am feeling a little better, and can 
talk about it. I had some ugly nights, I tell you ; but 
I am writing in good spirits, as you see. . . . 

P.S. Made a pretty good dinner, after all; but 
better a hash at home than a roast with strangers. 

XL 

Edward FitzGerald (1809-83), the translator of Cal- 
derdn and Omar Khayydm, is, with Byron and Stevenson, 
one of the three great letter-writers of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. His correspondence is easy,, entertaining, and origi- 
nal, and, as his acquaintance was a wide one, what he has to 
say is of exceptional interest. His familiar letters are, there- 
fore, models of their kind. 

Edward FitzGerald to John Allen 

Manchester, May 23, 1835. 
Dear Allen, — 

I think that the fatal two months have elapsed, by 
which a letter shall become due to me from you. Ask 
Mrs. Allen if this is not so. Mind, I don't speak this 
upbraidingly, because I know that you did n't know 
where I was. I will tell you all about this by degrees. 
In the first place I staid at Mirehouse till the begin- 
ning of May, and then, going homeward, spent a 
week at Ambleside, which, perhaps you don't know, is 
on the shores of Winandermere. It was very pleasant 
there : though it was to be wished that the weather 
had been a little better. I have scarce done anything 
since I saw you but abuse the weather: but these 
four last days have made amends for all : and are, I 
hope, the beginning of summer at last. Alfred Tenny- 



72 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

son staid with me at Ambleside : Spedding ^o was 
forced to go home, till the last two days of my stay 
there. I will say no more of Tennyson than that the 
more 1 have seen of him, the more cause I have to 
think him great. His little humours and grumpi- 
nesses were so droll, that I was always laughing : and 
was often put in mind (strange to say) of my little 
unknown friend. Undine — I must however say, fur- 
ther, that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense 
of depression at times from the overshadowing of a so 
much more lofty intellect than my own : this (though 
it may seem vain to say so) I never experienced be- 
fore, though I have often been with much greater in- 
tellects : but I could not be mistaken in the universal- 
ity of his mind ; and perhaps I have received some 
benefit in the now more distinct consciousness of my 
dwarfishness. I think that you should keep all this to 
yourself, my dear Allen : I mean, that it is only to you 
that I would write so freely about myself. You know 
most of my secrets, and I am not afraid of entrusting 
even my vanities to so true a man. 

Pray, do not forget to say how the Freestone party 
. are. My heart jumped to them, when I read in a 
guide book at Ambleside, that from Scawf ell (a moun- 
tain in Westmoreland) you could see Snowdon. Per- 
haps you will not see the chain of ideas : but I sup- 
pose there was one, else I don't know how it was that 
I tumbled, as it were, from the very summit of Scaw- 
fell, upon the threshold of Freestone. The mind soon 
traverses Wales. I have not been reading very much 
— (as if you ever expected that I did !) — but I mean, 
not very much for me — some Dante, by the aid of a 
Dictionary: and some Milton — and some Words- 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 73 

worth — and some Selections from Jeremy Taylor,^! 
Barrow, ^^ etc., compiled by Basil Montagu — of 
course you know the book : it is published by Picker- 
ing. I do not think that it is very well done : but it 
has served to delight, and, I think, to instruct me 
much. Do you know South ? ^^ He must be very great, 
I think. It seems to me that our old Divines will 
hereafter be considered our Classics — (in Prose, I 
mean) — I am not aware that any other nations have 
such books. A single selection from Jeremy Taylor is 
fine : but it requires a skilful hand to put many de- 
tached bits from him together: but a common editor 
only picks out the flowery metaphorical morsels : and 
so rather cloys : and gives quite a rather wrong esti- 
mate of the Author, to those who had no previous 
acquaintance with him : for, rich as Taylor's illustra- 
tions, and grotesque as his images are, no one keeps a 
grander proportion : he never huddles illustration upon 
the matter so as to overlay it, nor crowds images too 
thick together : which these Selections might make one 
unacquainted with him to suppose. This is always the 
fault of Selections : but Taylor is particularly liable 
to injury on this score. What a man he is ! He has 
such a knowledge of the nature of man, and such 
powers of expressing its properties, that I sometimes 
feel as if he had had some exact counterpart of my own 
individual character under his eye, when he lays open 
the depths of the heart, or traces some sin to its root. 
The eye of his portrait expresses this keen intuition : 
and I think I should less like to have stood with a lie 
on my tongue before him than before any other I 
know of. 

I beg you to give my best remembrances to your 



74 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

lady, who may be always sure that in all I wish of 
well for you, she is included : so that I take less care 
to make mention of her separately. 



XLI 

This extract from a letter to Charles Eliot Norton (1817- 
1909), the American translator of Dante, presents an inti- 
mate picture of Carlyle, together with some suggestive com- 
ment on American writers. 

Edward Fitz Gerald to Charles Eliot Norton 

Little Grange, Woodbridge, 
Jan. 23, 76. 

My dear Sir, — 

I suppose you may see one of the Carlyle Medal- 
lions : and you can judge better of the Likeness than 
I, who have not been to Chelsea, and hardly out of 
Suffolk, these fifteen years or more. I dare say it is 
like him : but his Profile is not his best phase. In 
two notes dictated by him since that Business he 
has not adverted to it : I think he must be a little 
ashamed of it, though it would not do to say so in 
return, I suppose. And yet I think he might have 
declined the Honours of a Life of " Heroism." I have 
no doubt he would have played a Brave Man's Part 
if called on ; but, meanwhile, he has only sat pretty 
comfortably at Chelsea, scolding all the world for not 
being Heroic, and not always very precise in telling 
them how. He has, however, been so far heroic, as to 
be always independent, whether of Wealth, Rank, 
and Coteries of all sorts : nay, apt to fly in the face of 
some who courted him. I suppose he is changed, or 
subdued, at eighty : but up to the last ten years he 



EDWARD FITZGERALD 75 

seemed to me just the same as when I first knew him 
five and thirty years ago. What a Fortune he might 
have made by showing himself about as a Lecturer, as 
Thackeray and Dickens did ; I don't mean they did 
it for Vanity : but to make money : and that to spend 
generously. Carlyle did indeed lecture near forty years 
ago before he was a Lion to be shown, and when he 
had but few Readers. I heard his " Heroes " ^* which 
now seems to me one of his best Books. He looked 
very handsome then, with his black hair, fine Eyes, 
and a sort of crucified Expression. 

I know of course (in Books) several of those you 
name in your Letter : Longfellow, whom I may say I 
love, and so (I see) can't call him Mister : and Emer- 
son whom I admire, for I don't feel that I know the 
Philosopher so well as the Poet : and Mr. Lowell's 
" Among my Books " is among mine. I also have al- 
ways much liked, I think rather loved, O. W. Holmes. 
I scarce know why I could never take to that man 
of true Genius, Hawthorne. There is a little of my 
Confession of Faith about your Countrymen, and 
I should say mine, if I were not more Irish than 
English. 

XLII 

This affectionate note of farewell from William Make- 
peace Thackeray (1811-63), the novelist, to his old friend 
FitzGerald shows the large-heartedness which made the 
writer a universal favorite. The solemnity of it all, however, 
seems a little ludicrous to-day, when we remember that the 
" great voyage " was one merely across the Atlantic to the 
United States. 



76 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

William Makepeace Thackeray to Edward FitzGerald 

October 27, 1852. 
My dearest old Friend, — 

I must n't go away without shaking your hand, 
and saying Farewell and God Bless you. If anything 
happens to me, you by these presents must get ready 
the Book of Ballads which you like, and which I had 
not time to prepare before embarking on this voyage. 
And I should like my daughters to remember that you 
are the best and oldest friend their Father ever had, 
and that you would act as such : as my literary execu- 
tor and so forth. My Books would yield a something 
as copyrights : and, should anything occur, I have 
commissioned friends in good place to get a pension 
for my poor little wife. — Does not this sound gloom- 
ily ? Well : who knows what Fate is in store : and I 
feel not at all downcast, but very grave and solemn 
just at the brink of a great voyage. 

I shall send you a copy of Esmond ^^ to-morrow or 
so which you shall yawn over when you are inclined. 
But the great comfort I have in thinking about my 
dear old boy is that recollection of our youth when we 
loved each other as I do now while I write Farewell. 

Laurence has done a capital head of me ordered by 
Smith the Publisher : and I have ordered a copy and 
Lord Ashburton another. If Smith gives me this one, 
I shall send the copy to you. I care for you as you 
know, and always like to think that I am fondly and 
affectionately yours, 

W. M. T. 

I sail from Liverpool on Saturday morning by the 
Canada for Boston. 



CHARLES DICKENS 77 

XLIII 

Much of the early correspondence of Charles Dickens 
(1812-70) is rich in that exuberance of animal spirits and 
that broad merriment which found inimitable expression in 
the Pickwick Papers (1837-39). At the time of this letter, 
Dickens, just returned from America, had completed Mar- 
tin Chiizzlewit^ which contained some caustic satire on 
American vulgarity and provincialism. Mr. Felton was but 
one of many readers whom this unnecessary attack had 
displeased. 

Charles Dickens to Mr. Felton 

Broadstairs, Kent, 
September 1, 1843. 

My dear Felton, — 

If I ever thought it in the nature of things that you 
and I could ever agree on paper, touching a certain 
Chuzzlewitian question whereupon Forster tells me 
you have remarks to make, I should immediately walk 
into the same, tooth and nail. But as I don't, I won't. 
Contenting myself with the prediction, that one of 
these years and days, you will write or say to me : 
" My dear Dickens, you were right, though rough, and 
did a worid of good, though you got most thoroughly 
hated for it ." To whick I shall reply : " My dear 
Felton, I looked a long way off and not immediately 
under my nose." — At which sentiment you will laugh, 
and I shall laugh ; and then (for I foresee this will 
all happen in my land) we shall call for another pot 
of porter and two or three dozens of oysters. 

Now, don't you in your own heart and soul quarrel 
with me for this long silence ? 

Not half so much as I quarrel with myself, I know ; 



78 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

but if you could read half the letters I write you in 
imagination, you would swear by me for the best of 
correspondents. The truth is, that when I have done 
my morning's work, down goes my pen, and from that 
minute I feel it a positive impossibility to take it up 
again, until imaginary butchers and bakers wave me 
to my desk. The post-office is my rock ahead. My 
average number of letters that must be written every 
day is, at the least, a dozen. And you could no more 
know what I was writing to you spiritually, from the 
perusal of the bodily thirteenth, than you could tell 
from my hat what was going on in my head, or could 
hear my heart on the surface of my flannel waistcoat. 
This is a little fishing place ; intensely quiet ; built 
on a cliff, whereon — in the center of a tiny semi- 
circular bay — our house stands; the sea rolling and 
dashing under the windows. Seven miles out are 
the Goodwin Sands (you've heard of the Goodwin 
Sands ?) whence floating lights perpetually wink after 
dark, as if they were carrying on intrigues with the 
servants. Also there is a big lighthouse called the 
North Foreland on a hill behind the village, a severe 
parsonic light, which reproves the young and giddy 
floaters, and stares grimly out upon the sea. Under 
the cliff are rare good sands, where all the children 
assemble every morning and throw up impossible for- 
tifications, which the sea throws down again at high 
water. Old gentlemen and ancient ladies look all day 
through telescopes and never see anything. In a bay- 
window in a one-pair sits, from nine o 'clock until one, 
a gentleman with rather long hair and no neck-cloth, 
who writes and grins ax^ if he thought he were very 
funny indeed. His name is Boz.^^ At one he disap- 



CHARLES DICKENS 79 

pears, and presently emerges from a bathing-macliine, 
and maybe seen — a kind of salmon-coloured porpoise 
— splashing about in the ocean. After that he may 
be seen in another bay-window on the ground floor, 
eating a strong lunch; after that, walking a dozen 
miles or so, or lying on his back in the sand reading 
a book. Nobody bothers him unless they know he is 
disposed to be talked to ; and I am told he is very 
comfortable indeed. He 's as brown as a berry, and 
they do say is a small fortune to the innkeeper who 
sells beer and cold punch. But this is mere rumour. 
Sometimes he goes up to London (eighty miles, or so, 
away), and then I 'm told there is a sound in Lincoln's 
Inn Fields at night, as men laughing, together with a 
clinking of knives and forks and wine glasses. 

I often dream that I am in America again ; but, 
strange to say, I never dream of you. I am always 
endeavouring to get home in disguise, and have a 
dreary sense of distance. Apropos of dreams, is it 
not a strange thing if writers of fiction never dream 
of their own creations ; recollecting, I suppose, even 
in their dreams, that they have no real existence ? I 
never dream of any of my own characters, and I feel 
it so impossible that I would wager Scott never did 
of his, real as they are. I had a good piece of absurd- 
ity in my head a night or two ago. I dreamed that 
somebody was dead. I don't know who, but it 's not 
to the purpose. It was a private gentleman, or a partic- 
ular friend ; and I was greatly overcome when the 
news was broken to me (very delicately) by a gentle- 
man in a cocked hat, top boots, and a sheet. Nothing 
else. '' Good God ! " I said, '' is he dead?" '' He is as 
dead, sir," rejoined the gentleman, " as a door-nail. But 



80 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

we all must die, Mr. Dickens, sooner or later, my dear 
sir." " Ah !" I said, '' Yes, to be sure. Very true. But 
what did he die of ? " The gentleman burst into a flood 
of tears, and said in a voice broken by emotion : " He 
christened his youngest child. Sir, with a toasting fork." 
I never in my life was so affected as at his having 
fallen a victim to this complaint. It carried a convic- 
tion to my mind that he never could have recovered. 
I knew it was the most interesting and fatal malady 
in the world ; and I wrung the gentleman's hand in a 
convulsion of respectful admiration, for I felt that 
this explanation did equal honour to his head and 
heart. 

XLIV 

Robert Browning (1812-1889), one of the great poets of 
his century, married in 1846 Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), 
already a poetess of distinction. Mrs. Browning being in deli- 
cate health, the two took up their residence in Italy, where, 
in Florence, after fifteen years of happy married life, she 
died. This letter, written by Browning to his friend, Miss 
Euphrasia Haworth, describes Mrs. Browning's last hours. 
" Peni " or " Pen " was their son. 

Hobert Browning to Miss Euphrasia Haworth 

Florence : July 20, 1861. 
My Dear Friend, — 

I well know you feel as you say, for her once and 

for me now. Isa Blagden, perfect in all kindness to 

me, will have told you something perhaps — and one 

day I shall see you and be able to tell you myself as 

much as I can. The main comfort is that she suffered 

very little pain, none beside that ordinarily attending 

the simple attacks of cold and cough she was subject 



ROBERT BROWNING 81 

to — had no presentiment of the result whatever, and 
was consequently spared the misery of knowing she 
was about to leave us ; she was smilingly assuring me 
she was ''better," "quite comfortable — if I would 
but come to bed," to within a few minutes of the last. 
I think I foreboded evil at Rome, certainly from the 
beginning of the week's illness — but when I reasoned 
about it, there was no justifying fear — she said on 
the last evening '' it is merely the old attack, not so 
severe a one as that of two years ago — there is no 
doubt I shall soon recover," and I talked over plans 
for the summer, and next year. I sent the servants 
away and her maid to bed — so little reason for dis- 
quietude did there seem. Through the night she slept 
heavily, and brokenly — that was the bad sign — but 
then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unre- 
peatable things to me and sleep again. At four o'clock 
there were symptoms that alarmed me, I called the 
maid and sent for the doctor. She smiled as I proposed 
to bathe her feet, " Well, you are determined to make 
an exaggerated case of it! " Then came what my heart 
will keep till I see her again and longer — the most 
perfect expression of her love to me within my whole 
knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with 
a face like a girl's — and in a few minutes she died in 
my arms ; her head on my cheek. These incidents so sus- 
tain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their 
right : there was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor con- 
sciousness of separation, but God took her to himseK 
as you would lift a sleeping child from the dark, uneasy 
bed into your arms and the light. Thank God. Annun- 
ziata thought by her earnest ways with me, happy and 
smiling as they were, that she must have been aware of 



82 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

our parting's approach — but she was quite conscious, 
had words at command, and yet did not even speak of 
Peni, who was in the next room. Her last word was 
when I asked " How do you feel ? " — " Beautiful." 
You know 1 have her dearest wishes and interests to at- 
tend to at once — her child to care for, educate, estab- 
lish properly ; and my own life to fulfil as properly, — 
all just as she would require were she here. I shall leave 
Italy altogether for years — go to London for a few 
days' talk with Arabel — then go to my father and 
begin to try leisurely what will be best for Peni — 
but no more " housekeeping " for me, even with my 
family. I shall grow, stiU, I hope — but my root is 
taken and remains. 

I know you always loved her, and me too in my 
degree. I shall always be grateful to those who loved 
her, and that, I repeat, you did. 

She was, and is, lamented with extraordinary dem- 
onstrations, if one consider it. The Italians seem to 
have understood her by an instinct. I have received 
strange kindness from everybody. Pen is very well — 
very dear and good, anxious to comfort me as he calls 
it. He can't know his loss yet. After years, his will be 
worse than mine — he will want what he never had 
— that is, for the time when he could be helped by 
her wisdom, and genius and piety — I have had every- 
thing, and shall not forget. 

God bless you, dear friend. I believe I shall set 
out in a week. Isa goes with me — dear, true heart. 
You, too, would do what you could for us were you 
here and your assistance needful. A letter from you 
came a day or two before the end — she made me en- 
quire about the Frescobaldi Palace for you, — Isa 



CHARLOTTE BRONTE 83 

wrote you in consequence. I shall be heard of at 151, 
rue de Grenelle, St. Germain. 

Faithfully and affectionately yours, 

Egbert Browning. 



XLV 

Charlotte Bronte (1816-55), who was to become known 
later as the author of Jane Eyre (1847), had, while still a 
girl, sent some of her verses to Robert Sou they (1774-1843), 
the poet and critic, asking for his comment and advice. 
He repUed, attempting to dissuade her from further writing, 
and said, among other things : '' Literature cannot be the 
business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." This 
letter is her answer. 

Charlotte Bronte to Robert Southey 

March 16, 1837. 

Sir, — • 

I cannot rest till I have answered your letter, even 
though by addressing you a second time I should ap- 
pear a little intrusive; but I must thank you for the 
kind and wise advice you have condescended to give 
me. I had not ventured to hope for such a reply ; so 
considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit. I must 
suppress what I feel, or you will think me foolishly 
enthusiastic. 

At the first perusal of your letter, I felt only shame 
and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you 
with my crude rhapsody ; I felt a painful heat rise to 
my face when I thought of the quires of paper I had 
covered with what once gave me so much delight, but 
which now was only a source of confusion ; but after I 
had thought a little and read it again and again, the 



84 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to 
write ; you do not say that what I write is utterly des- 
titute of merit. You only warn me against the folly 
of neglecting real duties for the sake of imaginative 
pleasures ; of writing for the love of fame ; for the 
selfish excitement of emulation. You kindly allow me 
to write poetry for its own sake, provided I leave 
undone nothing which I ought to do, in order to pur- 
sue that single, absorbing, exquisite gratification. I 
am afraid. Sir, you think me very foolish. I know the 
first letter I wrote to you was all senseless trash from 
beginning to end ; but I am not altogether the idle 
dreaming being it would seem to denote. My father 
is a clergyman of limited, though competent income, 
and I am the eldest of his children. He expended quite 
as much in my education as he could afford in justice 
to the rest. I thought it therefore my duty, when I 
left school, to become a governess. In that capacity 
I find enough to occupy my thoughts all day long, and 
my head and hands too, without having a moment's 
time for one dream of the imagination. In the even- 
ings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any 
one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any ap- 
pearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity, which 
might lead those I live amongst to suspect the nature 
of my pursuits. Following my father's advice — who 
from my childhood has counselled me, just in the wise 
and friendly tone of your letter — I have endeavoured 
not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman 
ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. 
I don't always succeed, for sometimes when I 'm teach- 
ing or sewing, I would rather be reading or writing ; 
but I try to deny myself ; and my father's approbation 



EBENEZER EOCKWOOD HOAR 85 

amply rewarded me for the privation. Once more 
allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust 
I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in 
print; if the wish should rise, I '11 look at Southey's 
letter, and suppress it. It is honour enough for me 
that I have written to him, and received an answer. 
That letter is consecrated ; no one shall ever see it, but 
papa and my brother and sisters. Again I thank you. 
This incident, I suppose, will be renewed no more ; 
if I live to be an old woman, I shall remember it 
thirty years hence as a bright dream. The signature 
which you suspected of being fictitious is my real name. 
Again, therefore, I must sign myself, 

C. Bronte. 

P.S. Pray, sir, excuse me for writing to you a second 
time ; I could not help writing, partly to tell you how 
thankful I am for your kindness, and partly to let you 
know that your advice shall not be wasted ; however 
sorrowfully and reluctantly it may at first be followed. 

C. B. 

XLVI 

Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar (1816-95), Attorney-General 
of the United States under President Grant, was a versatile 
and entertaining correspondent. This letter was written after 
his retirement to private life. 

Ehenezer Rochwood Hoar to John M. Forbes 

Concord, May 10, 1892. 
My dear Mr. Forbes, — 

I was much interested in the plan for keeping old 
fellows alive, by keeping them at work, which you 
were so kind as to send me. But the old codger I have 



86 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

to tote about is so infernally lazy, that I have often 
thought the best thing for me to do would be to dis- 
charge him from my service entirely. 

Still, though I have a great contempt for him, he 
has been with me so long and knows my ways so well, 
that when with difficulty I have got him up and dressed 
every morning, I conclude that I will let him loaf 
round one day more, and have his smoke and read the 
papers ; though I know he is not worth his keep, and 
is a great deal more bother than use to me or anybody. 
The plan you suggest has its merits, no doubt, and I 
believe has been tried on cab-horses with varying suc- 
cess. But on the other hand, taking it easy may suit 
some cases as well as the whip-and-spur treatment, 
though I always felt my conscience relieved by apply- 
ing the latter. Blessed is he who has done his day's 
work well, and can enjoy the evening shade and cool- 
ness without scheming or worry. 

Faithfully yours, 

E. R. HoAK. 

XLVII 

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), the naturalist and au- 
thor of Walden, had sent to Horace Greeley an essay on 
Carlyle, asking him to dispose of it. The publisher to whom 
Greeley sold the article did not send payment for over a 
year ; but finally Greeley secured the money by a sight 
draft, and turned it over to Thoreau. 

Henry David Thoreau to Horace Greeley 

Concord, May 19, 1848. 
My Friend Greeley, — 

I have to-day received from you fifty dollars. It is 

five years that I have been maintaining myself en- 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU a? 

tirely by manual labor, — not getting a cent from any 
other quarter or employment. Now this toil has oc- 
cupied so few days, — perhaps a single month, spring 
and fall each, — that I must have had more leisure 
than any of my brethren for study and literature. I 
have done rude work* of all kinds. From July, 1845, 
to September, 1847, 1 lived by myself in the forest,^^ 
in a fairly good cabin, plastered and warmly covered, 
which I built myself. There I earned all I needed 
and kept to my own affairs. During that time my 
weekly outlay was but seven-and-twenty cents ; and I 
had an abundance of all sorts. Unless the human race 
perspire more than I do, there is no occasion to live 
by the sweat of their brow. If men cannot get on 
without money (the smallest amount will suffice), the 
truest method of earning it is by working as a laborer 
at one dollar per day. You are least dependent so ; I 
speak as an expert, having used several kinds of labor. 

Why should the scholar make a constant complaint 
that his fate is specially hard ? We are too often told 
of " the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties," — 
how poets depend on patrons and starve in garrets, or 
at last go mad and die. Let us hear the other side of 
the story. Why should not the scholar, if he is really 
wiser than the multitude, do coarse work now and 
then ? Why not let his greater wisdom enable him to 
do without things ? If you say the wise man is un- 
lucky, how could you distinguish him from the fool- 
ishly unfortunate ? 

My friend, how can I thank you for your kindness? 
Perhaps there is a better way, — I will convince you 
that it is felt and appreciated. Here have I been sit- 
ting idle, as it were, while you have been busy in my 



88 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

cause, and have done so much for me. I wish you had 
had a better subject ; but good deeds are no less good 
because their object is unworthy. 

XLVIII 

John Ruskin (1819-1900), the English essayist and art 
critic, met the American scholar, Charles Eliot Norton, for 
the first time in 1855, and from that date until 1887 the 
two maintained a regular correspondence. This letter, writ- 
ten during the Civil War, expresses Ruskin's irritation at 
that conflict and tells something of his pessimistic moods. 

John Rushin to Charles Eliot Norton 

Denmark Hill, 6 January, '62. 

Dear Norton, — 

At home again at last, after six months' rest. I have 
two letters of yours unanswered. But after six months 
of doing nothing I feel wholly incapable of ever doing 
anything more, so I can't answer them. Only, so 
many thanks, for being nice and writing them. Thanks 
for " Atlantic." Lowell is delicious in the bits. " The 
coppers ain't all tails," ^^ and such like ; but I can't 
make out how it bears on the business — that 's lazi- 
ness too, I suppose. Also, for said business itself, I 
am too lazy to care anything about it, unless I hear 
there 's some chance of you or Lowell or Emerson's 
being shot, in which case I should remonstrate. For 
the rest, if people want to fight, my opinion is that 
fighting will be good for them, and I suppose when 
they 're tired, they '11 stop. They 've no Titians nor 
anything worth thinking about, to spoil — and the 
rest is all one to me. 

I 've been in Switzerland from the 20th September 



JOHN RUSKIN 89 

to day after Christmas. Got home on last day of year. 
It 's quite absurd to go to Switzerland in the summer. 
Mid-November is the time. I 've seen a good deal — 
but nothing ever to come near it. The long, low light 
— the floating frost cloud — the divine calm and mel- 
ancholy — and the mountains all opal below and pearl 
above. There 's no talking about it, nor giving you 
any idea of it. The day before Christmas was a clear 
frost in dead-calm sunlight. All the pines of Pilate 
covered with hoar-frost — level golden sunbeams — 
purple shadows — and a mountain of virgin silver. 

I 've been drawing — painting — a little ; with some 
seK-approval. I 'm tired of benevolence and elo- 
quence and everything that 's proper, and I 'm going 
to cultivate myself and nobody else, and see what will 
come of that. . I 'm beginning to learn a little Latin 
and Greek for the first time in my life, and find that 
Horace and I are quite of a mind about things in 
general. I never hurry nor worry ; I don't speak to 
anybody about anything ; if anybody talks to me, I 
go into the next room. I sometimes find the days 
very long, and the nights longer ; then I try to think 
it is at the worst better than being dead ; and so long 
as I can keep clear of toothache, I think I shall do 
pretty well. 

Now this is quite an abnormally long and studied 
epistle, for me, so mind you make the most of it — 
and give my love to your Mother and Sisters, and 
believe me 

Ever affectionately yours, 

J. RuSKIN, 



90 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

XLIX 

James Russell Lowell (1819-91), while still a boy and 
unknown to the literary world, had printed his Harvard 
Class Poem, in which, with more warmth than discretion, 
he made a rather bitter attack on Emerson. Hearing that 
his verses had met with some criticism on the ground of 
good taste, Lowell sent at once the following letter to the 
Concord essayist and poet. 

James Russell Lowell to Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Cambridge, Sept. 1st, 1838. 
Dear Sir, — 

In my class poem are a few lines about your " ad- 
dress." My friends have expressed surprise that after 
I had enjoyed your hospitality and spoken so highly 
of you in private, I should have been so "ungrateful" 
as ever to have written anything of the kind. Could 
I have ever dreamed that a man's private character 
should interfere with his public relations, I had never 
blotted paper so illy. But I really thought that I was 
doing rightly, for I consider it as virtual a lie to hold 
one's tongue as to speak an untruth. I should have 
written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble 
you with this letter because I think you a man who 
would think nowise the worse of me for holding up 
my head and speaking the truth at any sacrifice. That 
I could wilfully malign a man whose salt I had eaten, 
and whose little child I had danced on my knee, — he 
must be a small man who would believe so small a 
thing of his fellow. 

But this word " ingratitude " is a very harsh and 
grating word, and one which I hope would never be 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 91 

laid to my charge since I stood at my mother's knee 
and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of good- 
ness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will an- 
swer this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will 
acquit me (for I do not still think there is aught to 
forgive ov pardon^ and I trust you will not after read- 
ing this letter) of all uncharitableness. 

Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for 
since my friends have hinted at this " ingratitude " I 
have felt a great deal, and scarcely dare to look at 
the Tennyson you lent me without expecting some 
of the devils on the cover to make faces at me. 

I hope you will find time to answer this and that I 
may still enjoy your friendship and be able to take 
you by the hand and look you in the face, as honest 
man should to honest man. 

I remain yours with respect, 

James Russell Lowell. 

P.S. I have sent with this a copy of my " poem" — 

if it be not too tiresome, you would perhaps think 

better of me, if you were to read it through, I am 

not silly enough to suppose that this can be of any 

importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the 

passage I refer to), but it is of very great importance 

to me. 

J. R. L. 



Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), an American 
scholar whose fame rests chiefly on his Hans Breitmann 
Ballads and his studies of gypsy lore and life, was a man 
of wide interests and rich humor, as the following letter 
shows. 



92 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

Charles Godfrey Leland to Miss Mary A. Owen 

Hotel Victoria, Florence, 
Feb. 3, 1895. 

Many thanks for the letter, which is indeed a letter 
worth reading, which few are in these days when so 
few people write anything but notes or rubbish. Be 
sure of one thing, that yours are always read with a 
relish. For it is marvellously true that as tools are 
never wanting to an artist, there is always abundance 
to make a letter with to those who know how to write. 
There is always something to '' right about " — or to 
turn round to and see ! Dapprimo^ ^^ I thank you for 
the jokes from the newspapers. They are very good, 
but I observe that since I was in America, the real 
old extravaganza, the wild eccentric outburst, is dis- 
appearing from country papers. No editor bursts now 
on his readers all at once with the awful question, '' If 
ink stands, why does n't it walk?" Nor have I heard 
for years of the old-fashioned sequences, when one man 
began with a verse of poetry and every small newspaper 
reprinted it, adding a parody. Thus they began with 
Ann Tiquity and then added Ann Gelic and Ann 
O' Dyne — till they had finished the Anns. Emerson's 
Brahma ^^ elicited hundreds of parodies, till he actually 
suppressed it. 

Then there were the wild outbursts of poems such 
as — 

I seen her out a- walking 

In her hahit de la rue. 

But 't aint no use a-talking — 

But she 's pumpkins and a few. 

There was something Indian-like, aboriginal, and 
wild in the American fun of 40 years ago (vide Albert 



THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 93 

Pike's 61 Arkansas Gentleman and the Harp of a Thou- 
sand Strings^ which has no parallel now. My own 
"beautiful poem'' on a girl who had her underskirt 
made out of a coffee bag was republished a thousand 
times, — we were wilder in those days, and more ec- 
centric. All of these which you send me are very good, 
but they might all have been made in England. They 
are mild. Ere long there will be no America, 

1 have often thought of collecting and publishing 
all the eccentric poems I could get — such as Uncle 
Sarn^ "" By the bank of a murmuring stream^^ etc., 
but — nobody would care for them now. Other times, 
other tastes. — 

My forthcoming Florentine Legends will be nice, 
but I have got far better ones since I made it. The 
Breitmann 1 really think is fairly good — perhaps it 
will sell well. I have not much hope for Songs of the 
Sea and Lays of the Land by Sea G. Lay-land — yet 
there are three or four good ballads in it. But what I 
await, with gasping hope, is Flaxius^ which is in 
Watt's hands. 1 have not yet heard that he has found 
a publisher. It is my great work and as mad as a hatter. 

LI 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) writes to thank his 
friend, W. D. Howells, for a delightful visit at his home. 
This note, simple, informal, and graceful, should be com- 
pared with the solid sonorous letters of the early eighteenth 
century. 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells 

PoNKAPOG, Mass., Dec. 13, 1875. 
Dear Howells, — 

We had so charming a visit at your house that 1 

have about made up m}^ mind to reside with you per- 



94 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

manently. I am tired of writing. I would like to settle 
down in just such a comfortable home as yours, with 
a man who can work regularly four or five hours a 
day, thereby relieving one of all painful apprehen- 
sions in respect to clothes and pocket-money. I am 
easy to get along with. 1 have few unreasonable wants 
and never complain when they are constantly supplied. 
I think I could depend on you. 

Ever yours, 

T. B. A. 
P.S. I should want to bring my two mothers, my 
two boys (I seem to have everything in twos), my 
wife, and her sister. 

LII 

In this letter, Aldrich, writing to a sympathetic friend, 
Mr. George E. Woodberry, the living poet and critic, airs 
some original and positive literary opinions. 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich to George E. Woodberry 

PoNKAPOG, Mass., June 12, 1899. 
Dear Woodberry, — 

Don't ever go away from home on a ten months* 
absence without leaving somebody behind to answer 
your letters for you. I have been swamped, and am 
only just getting my head out of my correspondence. 
I found my private affairs in a tangle, too, and not 
easy to straighten out. But the slug's in the bud, and 
God'^ in the sky, and the world is all O.K., as 
Browning incidentally remarks. Apropos of Browning, 
I've been reading his letters to "Ba" and "Ba's" 
letters to him,^^ ^md think it a shameful thing that 
they should be printed. All that ponderous love- 



THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 95 

making — a queer mixture of Greek roots and middle- 
age stickiness (" Ba " was forty years old) — is very 
tedious. Here and there is a fine passage, and one is 
amused by the way the lovers patronize eyerybody 
they don't despise. But as a whole the book takes 
away from Browning's dignity. A man — even the 
greatest — cannot stand being photographed in his 
pajahmas. Thank God, we are spared Shakespeare's 
letters to Anne Hathaway! Doubtless he wrote her 
some sappy notes. He did everything that ever man 
did. 

We are gradually breaking up here, preparatory to 
moving to The Crags, which has been closed these 
three summers. I shall go there without any literary 
plans, unless I carry out my idea of turning The Eve 
of St Agnes ^s into Kiplingese. Would n't it be de- 
licious I — 

St. Hagnes Heve ! 'ow bloomin' chill it was ! 

The Howl, for all his hulster, was acold. 

The 'are limped tremblin' through the blarsted grass, 

Etc., etc. 

I think it might make Keats popular again — poor 
Keats, who did n't know any better than to write pure 
English. The dear boy was n't ''up" to writing 
"Gawd" instead of God. 

In no haste, as ever, 

T. B. A. 
P.S. I met Browning on three occasions. He was 
very cordial to me in a man-of-the-world fashion. I 
did not greatly care for him personally. Good head, 
long body, short legs. Seated, he looked like a giant ; 
standing, he just missed being a dwarf. He talked 
well, but not so well as Lowell. — 



96 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 



LIII 

It IS not improbable that Robert Louis Stevenson (1850- 
1894) will be remembered as long for his letters as for 
Treasure Island and Virginihus Puerisque, Despite an 
occasional touch of too conscious artistry, most of his cor- 
respondence, with its frankness, its gracefulness, and its 
intimate charm, is of high literary value. This letter is a 
fragment of unconventional autobiography. 

Rohert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin 

608 Bush Street, San Francisco, 
(January 10, 1880) 

My dear Colvin, — 

This is a circular letter to tell my estate fully. You 
have no right to it, being the worst of correspondents ; 
but I wish to efface the impression of my last, so to 
you it goes. 

Any time between eight and half -past nine in the 
morning, a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a 
volume buttoned into the breast of it, may be ob- 
served leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell 
with an active step. The gentleman is R. L. S. ; the 
volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he 
meditates one of his charming essays. He descends 
Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a 
branch of the original Pine Street Coffee House, no 
less ; I believe he would be capable of going to the 
original itself, if he could only find it. In the branch 
he seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and 
a pampered menial, of High-Dutch extraction and, in- 
deed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him 
a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote 



ROBERT LOUIS STE\^NSON 97 

the deity, very good. A while ago, and R. L. S. used 
to find the supply of butter insufficient ; but he has 
now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll 
expire at the same moment. For this refection, he pays 
ten cents, or fivepence sterling. 

Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street 
observe the same slender gentleman armed, like George 
Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting kindling, 
and breaking coal for his fire. He does this quasi- 
publicly upon the window-sill ; but this is not to be 
attributed to any love of notoriety though he is indeed 
vain of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists 
in calling an axe) and daily surprised at the perpet- 
uation of his fingers. The reason is this : that the sill 
is a strong, supporting beam, and that blows of the 
sam3 emphasis in other parts of his room might knock 
the entire shanty into hell. Thenceforth, for from three 
to four hours, he is engaged darkly with an inkbottle. 
Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only pair that 
he possesses are innocent of lustre and wear the nat- 
ural hue of the material turned up with caked and 
venerable slush. The youngest child of his landlady 
remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant 
enters or quits the house, " Dere 's de author." Can it 
be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true 
clue to the mystery? The being in question is, at least, 
poor enough to belong to that honorable craft. 

His next appearance is at the restaurant of one 
Donadieu, in Bush Street, between Dupont and Kear- 
ney, where a copious meal, half a bottle of wine, coffee 
and brandy may be procured for the sum of four bits, 
alias fifty cents, £0, 2s. 2d. sterling. The wine is put 
down in a whole bottleful, and it is strange and pain- 



m SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

ful to observe the greed with which the gentleman in 
question seeks to secure the last drop of his allotted 
half, and the scrupulousness with which he seeks to 
avoid taking the first drop of the other. This is partly- 
explained by the fact that if he were to go over the 
mark — bang would go a tenpence. He is again armed 
with a book, but his best friends will learn with pain 
that he seems at this hour to have deserted the more 
serious studies of the morning. When last observed, 
he was studying with apparent zest the exploits of one 
Rocambole by the late Vicomte Ponson du Terrail. 
This work, originally of prodigious dimensions, he had 
cut into liths or thicknesses apparently for convenience 
of carriage. 

Then the being walks, where it is not certain. But 
by about half-past four a light beams from the win- 
dows of 608 Bush, and he may be observed sometimes 
engaged in correspondence, sometimes again plunged 
in the mysterious rites of the forenoon. About six he 
returns to the Branch Original, where he once more 
imbrues himself to the worth of fivepence in coffee 
and roll. The evening is devoted to writing and read- 
ing, and by eleven or half-past darkness closes over 
this weird and truculent existence. 

As for coin, you see I don't spend much, only you 
and Henley both seem to think my work rather bosh 
nowadays, and I do want to make as much as I was 
making, that is <£200 ; if I can do that, I can swim : 
last year, with my ill-health I touched only XI 09, that 
would not do, I could not fight it through on that ; 
but on £200, as I say, I am good for the world, and 
can even in this quiet way save a little, and that I 
must do. The worst is my health ; it is suspected that 



LAFCADIO HEARN 99 

I had an ague chill yesterday ; I shall know by to- 
morrow, and you know if I am to be laid down with 
ague the game is pretty well lost. But I don't know; 
I managed to write a good deal down in Monterey, 
when I was pretty sickly most o£ the time, and, by 
God, I '11 try, ague and all. I have to ask you frankly, 
when you write, to give me any good news you can, 
and chat a little, but just in the meantime^ give me 
no bad. If I could get Thoreau^ Emigrant^ and Ven- 
detta ^^ all finished and out of my hand, I should feel 
like a man who had made half a year's income in a 
half year ; but until the two last are finished^ you see, 
they don't fairly count. 

I am afraid I bore you sadly with this perpetual 
talk about my affairs ; I will try and stow it ; but you 
see it touches me nearly. 

Ever yours, 

K. li. S. 

LIV 

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1906), the brilliant writer on Ori- 
ental subjects, had a romantic career as journalist and 
teacher, most of his later life being spent in Japan, of which 
country he became a naturalized subject. The vivid imagi- 
native power and highly colored style of his essays appear 
also in his letters, of which at least three large volumes have 
been published. The outburst printed here is entirely char- 
acteristic of the man. 

Lafcadio Hearn to Joseph Tunison 

New York, 1889. 
Deae Joe, — 

By the time this reaches you I shall have disap- 
peared. 

The moment I get into all this beastly machinery 



100 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

called " New York," I get caught in some belt and 
whirled around madly in all directions until I have no 
sense left. This city drives me crazy, or, if you prefer, 
crazier ; and I have no peace of mind or rest of body 
till I get out of it. Nobody can find anybody, nothing 
seems to be anywhere, everything seems to be mathe- 
matics and geometry and enigmatics and riddles and 
confusion worse confounded : architecture and me- 
chanics run mad. One has to live by intuition and 
move by steam. I think an earthquake might produce 
some improvement. The so-called improvements in 
civilization have apparently resulted in making it im- 
possible to see, hear, or find anything out. You are 
improving yourselves out of the natural world. I want 
to get back among the monkeys and the parrots, under 
a violet sky among green peaks and an eternally violet 
and lukewarm sea, — where clothing is superfluous 
and reading too much of an exertion, — where every- 
body sleeps 14 hours out of the 24. This is frightful, 
nightmarish, devilish ! Civilization is a hideous thing. 
Blessed is savagery! Surely a palm 200 feet high is 
a finer thing in the natural order than seventy times 
seven New Yorks. I came in by one door as you went 
out at the other. Now there are cubic miles of cut 
granite and iron fury between us. I shall at once find 
a hackman to take me away. I am sorry not to see 
you — but since you live in hell what can I do? I will 
try to find you again this summer. 

Best affection, 

L. H. 



LAFCADIO HEAEN 101 

LV 

Hearn's delightful fund of humor, comparatively rare in 
his essays, finds frequent expression in his intimate letters 
to friends. 

Lafcadio Hearn to Mitchell McDonald 

Tokyo, July, 1898. 

Dear McDonald, — 

We ran over somebody last night — and the train 
therefore waited in mourning upon the track during 
a decorous period. We did not see Tokyo till after 
eleven considerably. But the waiting was not unpleas- 
ant. Frogs sang as if nothing had happened, and the 
breeze from the sea faintly moved through the cars ; — 
and I meditated about the sorrows and the joys of 
life by turns, and smoked, and thanked the gods for 
many things, — including the existence of yourself 
and Dr. Hall. I was not unfortunate enough to see 
what had been killed, — or the consequences to friends 
and acquaintances ; and feeling there was no more 
pain for that person, I smoked in peace — though not 
without a prayer to the gods to pardon my want of 
seriousness. 

Altogether I felt extremely happy, in spite of the 
delay. The day had been so glorious, — especially sub- 
sequent to the removal of a small h — 1, containing 
several myriads of lost souls, from the left side of my 
lower jaw. 

Eeaching home, I used some of that absolutely won- 
derful medicine. It was a great and grateful surprise. 
(I am not trying to say much about the kindness of 
the gift — that would be no use.) After having used 



102 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

it, for the first time, I made a tactile investigation with- 
out fear, and found — 

What do you think ? 

Guess ! 

Well, I found that — the wrong one had been 
pulled^ — No. 3 instead of No. 2. 

I don't say that No. 3 did n't deserve its fate. But 
it had never been openly aggressive. It had struggled 
to perform its duties under disadvantageous circum- 
stances : its character had been modest and shrinking. 
No. 2 had been, on the contrary, Mt. Vesuvius, the 
last great Japanese earthquake, the tidal wave of '96, 
and the seventh chamber of the Inferno, all in mathe- 
matical combination. It — Mt. Vesuvius, etc. — is 
still with me, and although to-day astonished into 
quiescence, is far from being extinct. The medicine 
keeps it still for the time. You will see that I have 
been destined to experience strange adventures. 

Hope I may be able to see you again soon^ — 4th, 
if possible. Love to you and all kind wishes to every- 
body. 

Lafcadio. 



LVI 

A recently published volume of selected letters of Wil- 
liam Vaughn Moody (1869-1910), the American poet whose 
early death has been so much lamented, shows him to have 
been a versatile and vivacious correspondent, worthy to be 
ranked with the best modern letter- writers. The specimen 
quoted here is rich in original touches, and is full of indi- 
viduality. 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 103 

William Vaughn Moody to Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, Feb. 16, 1896. 
Dear Dan, — 

I have just heard from your sister-in-law of your 
enforced furlough, I am not going to help you curse 
your luck, knowing your native capabilities in that 
direction to be perfectly adequate, but my Methodist 
training urges me to give you an epistolary hand- 
grasp, the purport of which is " ICeep your sand.^^ 
1 could say other things, not utterly pharisaical. I 
could say what I have often said to myself, — with a 
rather reedy tremolo perhaps, but swelling sometimes 
into a respectable diapason : " The dark cellar ripens 
the wine." And meanwhile, after one's eyes get used 
to the dirty light, and one's feet to the mildew, a cel- 
lar has its compensations. I have found beetles of 
the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether com- 
radely and persuadable, and forgotten potatoes that 
sprouted toward the crack of sunshine with a wan 
maiden grace not seen above. I don't want to pose as 
resourceful, but I have seen what I have seen. 

The metaphor is however happily inexact in your 
case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge hum- 
ming melodiously on the horizon. If you can only 
throttle your Daemon, or make him forego his leonine 
admonition, " Accomplish," and roar you as any suck- 
ing dove the sweet vocable " Be," — you ought to live. 
I have got mine trained to that, pardee ! and his voice 
grows not untunable. I pick up shreds of comfort out 
of this or that one of God's ash-barrels. 

Yesterday I was skating on a patch of ice in the 
pai:k, and under a poverty-stricken sky flyiog a piti- 



104. SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

ful rag of sunset. Some little muckers were guying a 
slim raw-boned Irish girl of fifteen, who circled and 
darted under their banter with complete unconcern. 
She was in the fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall 
and adorably awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty 
feathers, thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, 
and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was 
ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and skated 
for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, while the 
rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have had few sensa- 
tions in life that I would exchange for the warmth of 
her hand through the ragged glove, and the pathetic 
curve of the half-formed breast where the back of 
my wrist touched her body. I came away mystically 
shaken and elate. It is thus the angels converse. She 
was something absolutely authentic, new, and inex- 
pressible, something which only nature could mix for 
the heart's intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, 
pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and 
bird of God, — with something else bafflingly suf- 
fused, something ridiculous and frail and savage and 
tender. With a world offering such rencontres, such 
aery strifes and adventures, who would not live a 
thousand years stone dumb? I would, for one — until 
my mood changes and I come to think on the shut lid 
and granite lip of him who has done with sunsets and 
skating, and has turned away his face from aU man- 
ner of Irish. I am supported by a conviction that at 
an auction on the steps of the great white Throne, I 
shall bring more in the first mood than the second — 
by several harps and a stray dulcimer. 

I thoroughly euArjr you your stay at Milton — wrist, 
Daemon, and all. You must send me a lengthy ac- 



CHARLES W. ELIOT 105 

count of the state of things in Cambridge. ... If 
the wrist forbids writing, employ a typewriter of the 
most fashionable tint — I will pay all expenses and 
stand the breakage. I stipulate that you shall avoid 
blondes however ; they are fragile. 

William Vaughn Moody. 

LVII 

Charles W. EUot (1834- ), President Emeritus of 
Harvard College, educator and publicist of international 
reputation, writes in answer to a question as to his part in 
initiating and developing the study of English in American 
schools and colleges. More than any one else, he is respon- 
sible for placing English in its proper position as a major 
study in the curriculum of our educational institutions. 

Charles W. Eliot to 



CAMBRinGE, Mass., 
February 4, 1913. 

My dear Sir : — 

In writing a history of college entrance require- 
ments in English, I think you would do well to ad- 
here closely to the announcements made in the college 
catalogues, such as those you quote in your letter of 
February third. Of course those announcements were 
generally the product of preceding discussions in col- 
lege faculties, or of the opinions of some college execu- 
tive, or executive board. 

As to the Harvard requirements, you are right In 
thinking that I brought the subject to the attention of 
the Harvard Faculty in 1869-70, and procured the 
appointment of Mr. John Richard Dennett as Assist- 
ant Professor of Khetoric. He served from 1869 to 



106 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

1872 ; and was followed in 1872 by Adams Sherman 
Hill, with the same title; but in 1876 Mr. Hill suc- 
ceeded Professor Francis James Child as Boylston 
Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, taking charge of 
the English Composition in the College, while Pro- 
fessor Child was advanced to good work in literature. 
Professor Dennett was an advocate of requirements in 
English, and assisted in the adoption of the first Har- 
vard requirements ; but it was Professor Adams Sher- 
man Hill who had more to do than anybody else with 
the shaping of the Harvard requirements for ten 
years. 

As to the motives which determined the Harvard 
requirements during the '70s and '80s, they were 
chiefly the hope of improving the teaching of Eng- 
lish in the secondary schools, and the belief that col- 
lege instruction in English, language and literature, 
could be much advanced if the elements thereof had 
been mastered before the boys came to college. It has 
turned out that college instruction in English has 
been greatly improved and enlarged ; but to this day 
the instruction in English in the secondary schools 
leaves much to be desired, or rather, many young men 
arrive at the portals of the colleges without having ac- 
quired the elements of correct speech and writing. On 
the whole, however, the introduction of English into 
college requirements for admission has worked well 
both for the colleges and the schools, and the bene- 
ficial influence is still at work. 

Sincerely yours, 

Charles W, Eliot. 



HENRY VAN DYKE 107 

LVIII 

Dr. Henry van Dyke, the well-known essayist and poet, 
writes to congratulate his friend, Mr. Madison Caweiu, on 
the appearance of a new and brilliant volume of verse. 

Henry van Dyke to Madison Cawein 

Grand Hotel Alpina, Gstaad. 
My dear Madison Cawein, — 

Some procrastinating imp must have slipped into 
my fountain pen, to make me put off for so long a 
time the warm and hearty thanks which I have owed 
you since you sent me your New Poems. The other 
little volume by your young admirer had some pretty 
touches and sweet notes in it, — but here comes the 
master-lyrist and the disciple fades. This new book of 
yours is extraordinarily rich in music and colour. It is 
in these bits of pure song and absolute picture that I 
think you at your best. You have often words so vivid 
that they seem to convey an actual form, colour, 
movement, to the page : and you have sometimes ca- 
dences so delicately melodious that they seem to carry 
music with them. Next to this I put your elfin fancy, 
— for example as it plays in "Witchery." In this vol- 
ume your lyrics " with a story to tell " are very dif- 
ferent in tone. There is a strong contrast between the 
Italian Renaissance of " That Night when I came to 
the Grange," and the pure Kentucky of " The Old Gate 
made of Pickets," and the anywhere of " Tramps." 
But each one has its own kind of imaginative pas- 
sion. You tend to the intense in your poetry, — al- 
ways, — and sometimes I think you agitate Nature a 
little too much with piercing adjectives and violent 



108 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

verbs. She has her wild moods, her fantastic hours, 
and these you render wonderfully. But most of the 
time she is as simple as a milk-maid and as great as 
the Venus of Melos, — sure of herself, inexhaustible, 
a little lazy, and full of intimate and tranquil charm, 
I don't mean to say that you fail to see or to express 
this ; but now and then you yield to the temptation 
to make her scream, — you " stab " the haws with a 
sunbeam, — or you give the innocent grasshopper a 
dagger, — or you make the poor bat very, very drunk. 
This is naughty, Madison, naughty, naughty ! But I '11 
forgive you all these agitating escapades when you can 
write such a couplet as, 

" While from a curved and azure jar 
She poured the white moon and a star." 

The sonnet sequence at the end of the book MutOr 
tis Mutandis is full of curious strength. You have 
done well to use the double rhyme, the feminine end- 
ing, to mark the change of manner with the change 
of form. This is not like any of your other work, 
but it is very interesting, picturesque, and mordant. 
Sometimes I think the next famous poetry will 
be satire, and sometimes I think satire can never be 
great poetry. 

But I congratulate you warmly on the book, — you 
have never made a better, — and I thank you for 
writing it and sending it to me. 

Gertrude gives glowing accounts of your doings at 
Annisquam. Evidently you have all had a hilarious, 
resplendent, and expansive time. I shall write to her 
soon to narrate our placid experiences among the 
eternal hills of snow. Meantime our ship is getting 



HART, SCHAFFNER & MARX 109 

ready, for we sail on La Savoie, on the 4th of Sep- 
tember, for home, — and it 's glad we '11 be to get 
there. 

Yours ever, 

Henry van Dyke. 

August 23, 1909. 

LIX 

This is an admirable example of the best type of modern 
business letter : courteous, lucid, and very much to the 
point. 

Hart^ Schaffner & Marx to The John JR. Jones 

Company 

Chicago, January 23, 1913. 
Gentlemen : — 

It is our impression that you make very little use 
of newspaper space. We may be wrong in that idea, 
but you ask for so few electrotypes and we see so few 
papers, that we think you are not great believers in 
newspaper space. 

Examples make the best arguments, and we are 
therefore mailing some newspapers showing the use of 
space by merchants in every corner of the country. 
We believe the general conditions under which you 
operate are not different from theirs. 

The fact that you asked the other day for a per- 
sonal letter indicates that you believe in that form of 
publicity. There is none better, providing you link it 
with newspaper copy. Advertising experts everywhere 
agree that newspaper advertising, even where the 
mediimi is only fairly efficient, is the best means of 
getting trade. 

In the old days, the merchant depended on his per- 



110 SELECTED ENGLISH LETTERS 

sonality, his acquaintances, for trade. You know how 
times have changed, how people read the newspapers, 
how men depend on publicity, how they look in the 
daily paper not only for general news, but news of 
" where to buy." 

When the spring season opens up, we are going to 
take the liberty of sending you some fine, new, at- 
tractive newspaper illustrations, together with some 
copy particularly suited to your people. We hope you 
will permit us to do this, and that you will be will* 
ing to give us some information about your trade, 
your newspapers, and the things you want to feature 
specially. We shall be glad to have your ideas on the 
subject. It is only because we think you can seU 
more goods under this plan that we mention it. 

Yours truly. 
Hart, Schaffner & Marx. 

LX 

This letter gives a happy and graceful touch to what, at 
bottom, is a simple matter of business. 

Houghton Mifflin Company to Honorable Woodrow 

Wilson 

December 18th, 1912. 
To His Excellency, Woodrow Wilson, 
Governor of New Jersey, 
Princeton, N.J. 
Dear Mr. Wilson, — 

It is with reluctance that we add to the burden of 
your correspondence. There is, however, a matter 
concerning which we very much wish to have your 
authorization. 



HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 111 

We are extremely desirous of publishing upon the 
fourth of March next, in our series of Riverside Press 
special limited editions, an edition of some four or 
five hundred copies of the first three papers in your 
" Mere Literature," — to wit, " Mere Literature," 
" The Author Himself," and " The Author and His 
Friends." These three essays, taken by themselves, 
present, we believe, with persuasiveness and authority 
a point of view that is in the deepest sense of the 
word timely. 

We enclose a list of the books that have already 
appeared in the series, which will perhaps give you 
some notion of its scope and aim. It is not with us 
primarily a commercial undertaking, but in a large 
measure a labor of love in which we strive to give a 
perfect bookish embodiment to the things in literature 
that are of quality and distinction. 

Henry James has somewhere a phrase to the effect 
that Lowell's diplomatic success was the revanclie of 
letters. May we say that a similar feeling is enter- 
tained, we think, by men of letters everywhere in re- 
gard to the result of the last presidential election. 
This gives, we think, a peculiar fitness to the publi- 
cation that we are proposing. 

Believe us, 

Faithfully yours, 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 



NOTES 

PAGE 

4 I. Rampired: fortified with a rampart. 

4 2. Sir Philip Sidney^s mother was Mary, sister of Robert 
Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who was Queen Ehzabeth's 
favorite. 

5 3. Labes generis: a degenerate of your race. 

7 4. Pope's translation of the Iliad was completed in 1720, 
and his Odyssey in 1725. 

7 5- Harley, Earl of Oxford (1661-1724), was made Lord 
High Treasurer in 1712, under Queen Anne, but lost his 
office at the accession of George I. He and Swift were on 
intimate terms. 

8 6. A reference to Timon, the Greek misanthropist, and 
the chief character in the Shakespearean play, Timon of 
Athens. 

9 7. Mr. Bays, a satiric representation of John Dryden 
(1631-1700), was the principal figure in a burlesque comedy, 
The Rehearsal (1682), written by the Duke of Buckingham 
and others. 

9 8. ^' It is not given to every one to have a nose.'' 
9 9. Horace (65 b.c.-8 b.c.) was a Latin author famous 
for his Odes, Satires, and Epistles. Many familiar quota- 
tions are taken from his works. 
11 ID. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751), after 
a rapid rise to political power, planned, in 1714, to restore 
the Stuart family to the throne. After the accession of 
George I, he was impeached and his name was erased from 
the roll of peers. He was, however, pardoned in 1723, and 
his estates were restored in 1725. He returned to his coun- 
try home at Dawley, near Uxbridge, where he frequently 
entertained Pope and Swift. His philosophy had a great 
influence on Pope, who made it the basis of his Essay on 
Man. 

11 II. Lepidus, Mark Antony, and Octavius (afterwards 
the Emperor Augustus) formed, in b.c. 43, a triumvirate 
for the division of the Roman world. 

12 12. The Dunciad, Pope's brilliant but scurrilous satiric 
attack on the poetasters of his time, was published first in 
1728. 

12 13. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), physician and author, 
was distinguished by Pope in his witty Epistle to Dr. Ar- 
buthnot. 

18 14. The Literae Humaniores were the classical languages, 
Latin and Greek. 

19 15. Operam et oleixm: labor and oil. 



NOTES 113 

PAGE 

19 1 6. Port Royal: a lay community established in Paris 
in 1633, celebrated because of the famous scholars who fre- 
quented it and because of the educational books edited by 
them for its school. 

21 17. '^ The conqueror of the conqueror of the world." 

24 18. This is a reference to Lord Bute, a favorite of the 
Queen, hated because he was a Scotchman. He became 
Minister in 1762. 

24 19. Lord George Sackville (1716-85), later known as 
Lord George Germain, a favorite of George III, was 
generally despised because of his cowardice as a general. 

24 20. George III, born in 1738, became king in 1760 on 
the death of his grandfather, George II. 

25 21. The Duke of Newcastle (1692-1768), a prominent 
statesman who held the position of Secretary of State from 
1722 to 1752, was, at this time, joint head of the Govern- 
ment with William Pitt. 

25 22. Le Medecin malgre ltd: a reference to Moliere's 
famous play. A literal translation is " The Physician 
beside Himself." 

25 23. The burial of George II, who had died on October 25, 
1760. 

25 24. The funeral took place, like all royal ceremonies of 
the kind, in Westminster Abbey. 

26 25. The Duke of Cumberland, the second son of George 
II and therefore the uncle of George III, was an unsuccess- 
ful general, who had earned the nickname of the " Bloody 
Butcher." 

27 26. Marshal Daun (1705-66), leader of the armies of 
France and Austria against Frederick the Great, after 
several brilliant victories was overwhelmed in 1760, and 
lost prestige as a commander. 

28 27. Of this Royal Academy, established in 1770, Sir 
Joshua Reynolds was made the first President. 

29 28. George Colman (1732-94), was a minor dramatist 
of the period. 

31 29. Johnson had assailed Milton in his Life oj Milton^ 
included in his well-known lAves of the Poets. 

33 30. Cowper^s blank-verse translation of Homer was pub- 
lished in 1791. 

38 31. Of Crabbers earlier poems, The Village appeared in 
1783 and The Library in 1781. 

44 32. John Dennis (1657-1734), a savage critic of the 
Queen Anne period, died considerably before the age of 
ninety. 

44 33. James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), a poet and 
journalist, was sentenced in 1811 to two years' imprison- 
ment for libel on the Prince Regent. 

44 34. James Montgomery (1771-1854), a minor poet, was 
imprisoned in 1796 for some obnoxious political articles 
printed in a paper of which he was the editor. 



61 


41 


61 


42. 


63 


43 


56 


. 44< 



114 NOTES 

PAGE 

45 35. Christie's was, and is still, a famous London auction- 
room. 

46 36. Wordsworth's Laodamia, one of his few poems on 
classical subjects, was published in 1815. 

47 37. Samuel Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), a clergyman 
who had edited the works of Pope, carried on with Byron 
a prolonged controversy, in which Byron defended the 
character and poetry of his favorite English poet. 

50 38. This refers to a savage attack on Robert Southey and 
Robert, Viscount Castlereagh, in the Introduction to Don 
Juan. 
50 39. Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), an Italian patriot and au- 
thor, had taken refuge in England in 1816. 
50 40. Byron's Childe Harold had appeared in four cantos, 
the first two in 1812, the second in 1816, and the tlnrd in 
1817. 

" To please women and the crowd." 
An allusion to MacbeWs " the sear, the yellow leaf." 
Keats's Endjonion had appeared in 1818. 
Byron's Marino Faliero (1819) was a tragedy deal- 
ing with a remarkable incident in Venetian history. 

56 45. Southey's Curse of Kehama, an epic poem, had 
appeared in 1810. 

57 46. Melincourt (1818) was one of Peacock's character- 
istic novels. 

57 47. Circean palace : an allusion to the enchantress Circe, 
visited by Odysseus on his voyage home from Troy. She had 
the power of turning men into swine. 

63 48. Macaulay had begim his connection with the Edin-^ 
burgh Review^ which had been founded by Sydney Smith 
and others in 1802, by contributing in 1825 his famous 
Essay on Milton. 

70 49. A parody of Wordsworth's "still sad music of 
humanity," in his Tintern Abbey. 

72 50. James Spedding (1808-81), an essayist and miscel- 
laneous writer, is remembered chiefly for his elaborate edi- 
tion of the works of Sir Francis Bacon. 

73 51. Jeremy Taylor (1613-67) was an eloquent and 
impassioned preacher, who published many controversial 
tracts. 

73 52. Isaac Barrow (1630-77) was an eminent scholar and 

divine, 
73 53. Robert South (1634-1716) was, like Taylor and 

Barrow, a prominent clergyman, and one of the wittiest of 

Enghsh sermonizers. 

75 54. Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship was given first 
as a series of lectures in 1837, and published in 1841. 

76 55. Thackeray's Henry Esmond, an historical novel of 
the age of Queen Anne, was published in 1852. 

78 56. Dickens's first volume had been called Sketches by 
Boz (1836), and he accepted the nickname as his own. 



NOTES 115 

PAGE 

87 57. Thoreau^s cabin was located on Walden Pond, near 
Concord, Massachusetts. 

88 58. This is a reference to LowelPs second collection of 
Biglow Papers, published in the Atlantic during 1862. 

92 59. Dapprimo : first of all. 

92 60. Emerson's Brahma is a short poem of some obscurity 
of meaning, beginning, 

*' If the red slayer think he slays, 
Or if the slain think he is slain." 

93 61. Albert Pike (1809-91) was an American poet, born 
in Boston, who imitated Coleridge and Keats. 

94 62. The Browning love-letters were first printed in 1889. 

95 63. Keats's Eve of St. Agnes appeared in 1820. 

99 64. These titles refer to essays on which Stevenson was 
then working. 



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